08/30/07

New on the Market—North Kenwood, Chicago

List Price: $1.199 million

The Property: The elaborately carved façade of this 104-year-old, 8,500-square-foot Drexel Boulevard graystone only hints at the impressive workmanship inside—and provides evens less information about the amount of work that will be required to update some parts of the house. First, a look at the place’s strong points, beginning in the entry hall, which, with its walnut wainscoting, beams, newel posts, and benches, resembles a chapel. The living and dining rooms are similarly impressive, while the library is a jaw-dropping composition of...

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08/29/07

Housing Bulletin—Landmark Evanston Mansion Returns to Glory

In an era of proliferating McMansions, it’s nice to see the real thing grab the attention of homebuyers. In Evanston, two developers have reclaimed a Georgian mansion perched on a ridgetop, transforming it from a rundown school-district outpost into four condominiums.

“This really was the grandest house in Evanston,” says Mike Niazmand, a longtime Evanston resident who, with his partner,...

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08/27/07

Sale of the Week—Lake View, Chicago

List Price: $1,755,000
Sale Price: $1,755,341

The Property: Thanks to its extra-wide lot—31 feet, compared to the city norm of 25—the second floor of this brick and limestone house accommodates four bedrooms, not just three. “People find it advantageous to have all the family bedrooms on the one floor,” says John McNaughton, the real-estate agent who,...

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08/23/07

New on the Market—Going the Extra Yard in Lincoln Park

List Price: $3,977,000

The Property: Filling its slender lot nearly to the perimeter leaves this new Lincoln Park mansion with only a few slivers of open ground. No problem: there is still a yard—only it’s upstairs and spread across several levels.

Two of the levels are directly off the family room, right where you might expect a backyard to be. The lower of these...

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08/22/07

Housing Bulletin—Going for the Green

You might expect the guy who built and sold one of the more expensive “green” houses in Chicago to be a lifelong environmentalist whose crusade is finally paying off. But no: Paul Ahlrich initially jumped onto the green housing bandwagon for the potential payoff. “I did these [houses] to learn how to build green so I could keep making money in a bad market,” Ahlrich says of the houses at 2652, 2656, and 2658 West Walton Street; the westernmost house (2658) sold on July 27th for $923,000...

Posted at 07:22 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (2)

08/20/07

Sale of the Week—A Fox Lake Retreat

List Price: $1,399,000
Sale Price: $1,376,420

The Property: At the northern tip of Stanton Point, a slim peninsula that juts half a mile into Fox Lake, this newly built five-bedroom house is one of four new homes planned for the site of the old Jukebox Saturday Night bar. “It’s a one-of-a-kind point, the best place on the Chain,” says Keith Vargo,...

Posted at 07:58 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

08/16/07

New on the Market-Lake Forest's House of Mosaics

List Price: $7.5 million

The Property: Every exterior wall of this 9,000-square-foot house in Lake Forest is covered in pebble mosaics, all the way to the top of its three-story tower. The mosaics-some that date from the house's origins in 1882, and others from latter-day additions-depict hummingbirds, vines, family members' names, and cabbage roses. At times, the pebbles give...

Posted at 05:36 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (1)

08/15/07

Housing Bulletin-How One Developer Outsmarted the Condo Market

Six years ago, when Golub & Co., the Chicago-based real-estate development company, announced plans to build a high-rise rental-apartment building at 345 East Ohio Street, it seemed like a distinctly contrarian choice. At the time, virtually everyone with a piece of land downtown was building condo towers.

Look at how things have changed: Completed a year ago and dubbed the Streeter, the 481-unit building, now almost fully rented out, was sold last week to the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio, reportedly for about $210 million...

Posted at 09:42 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (1)

08/13/07

Sale of the Week-A Beachfront House with Prairie Style - Wilmette

List Price: $7,495,000
Sale Price: $7,250,000

The Property: This Prairie-style house-whose art glass and other decorative details have a beach grass motif that references its Lake Michigan shoreline setting-sold July 30th for the highest price on record in Wilmette. Built in 1915 on a street that is still cobbled in bricks, the house was the design of...

Posted at 06:50 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

08/09/07

New on the Market-Mies (Almost) Slept Here

List Price: $650,000

The Property: This two-bedroom condo in one of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's revolutionary steel and glass towers on Lake Shore Drive turns out to be the very apartment in which the great architect himself planned to live. Known as the "Glass Houses," the pair of buildings at 860 and 880 North Lake Shore Drive are local landmarks. In its guide to Chicago, the...

Posted at 05:17 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (1)

08/08/07

Housing Bulletin-Will Foreclosures Reverse Neighborhoods' Progress?

The growing number of foreclosures has already wiped out several mortgage companies and many families' financial footholds. Now some observers say it could turn back the clock in some inner-city neighborhoods and moderate-income suburbs that had shown improvement over the past decade.

Although foreclosures are occurring at every income level, they tend to be isolated cases in affluent areas. Neighboring properties tend not to lose value just because somebody down the block got overextended and lost the house. "But when you have four or five foreclosed properties on [one] block, it has an effect," says Geoff Smith, the research director for the Woodstock Institute, a Chicago-based economic development advocate for low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. "The properties are...

Posted at 07:39 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (1)

08/06/07

Sale of the Week–Motorola Co-Founder's Oak Park Home

List Price: $1,199,000
Sale Price: $1,070,000

The Property: This handsome brick Mediterranean-style house was the home of Joseph Galvin, who with his brother, Paul, founded the radio company that became the technology giant Motorola. The house was built in the late 1920s, according to James Collins, the agent for the house's sellers, Sam and Kathleen...

Posted at 06:09 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

08/02/07

New on the Market-Sculptural Contemporary in Lincoln Park

List Price: $3,799,000

The Property: This house is the enemy of right angles-and of ordinariness. From its jutting, multi-angled façade to its dramatic central fireplace (whose exposed chimney is a two-story assemblage of panels, tubes, and ribs), the house, built in 1992, refuses to be a vanilla box-although most of the interior walls are a crisp vanilla white.

Posted at 07:02 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

08/01/07

Housing Bulletin-Pritzkers' Super-Pricey Rental

While they renovate the Gold Coast mansion (pictured at right)  they bought last year for $14.5 million, J. B. and M. K. Pritzker are living in a 13-room townhouse two blocks away. The monthly rent: $30,000.

Jay Robert ‘J. B.' Pritzker, a member of the fourth Chicago generation of the uber-wealthy clan, is a partner in both the Pritzker...

Posted at 09:44 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)