List Price: $2.9 million
The Property: It’s a safe bet that when tourists on buses ogle the mansion at 1340 North State Parkway, they are more interested in the mansion’s swinging years as the Playboy Mansion rather than in the sumptuous Beaux Arts details of the century-old façade designed by James Gamble Rogers or the secluded formal garden on the building’s south end…
List Price: $2.9 million
The Property: It’s a safe bet that when tourists on buses ogle the mansion at 1340 North State Parkway, they are more interested in the mansion’s swinging years as the Playboy Mansion rather than in the sumptuous Beaux Arts details of the century-old façade designed by James Gamble Rogers or the secluded formal garden on the building’s south end.
Although it is shared by residents of all seven condos in the building, that boxwood-edged garden space is the de facto front yard of unit 1S, which surrounds it on two sides and has a handsome pillared entrance from the garden (as well as a main entrance from the mansion’s interior). The condo’s living room, dining room, kitchen, and family room all look into the garden, the latter via a large arched window with a wrought-iron inset.
The eight-room condo is laid out in three distinct zones. The formal zone contains a large living room and a similarly sized dining room flanking a pillared foyer. A separate “wing” contains the family room and kitchen, whose appliances and work spaces are subtly concealed by millwork so that the space hardly says “kitchen” and at first glance can be mistaken for a media center. (Only the stove hood gives it away.) The fine millwork continues in a study, and beyond it are three bedrooms. The master bedroom opens onto a private terrace (separate from the mansion’s garden) that is also accessed by the family room.
While it is situated on the ground floor in what may have originally been servants’ quarters, the condo benefits from high ceilings and the crown and baseboard moldings and window framing that LR Realty used throughout the building when converting the disused mansion (which for a while had been a School of the Art Institute dorm) into a set of high-end condos.
Pamela Hamilton, who bought the condo in 1998 for an amount that isn’t clear from public records, is moving to another home in the city, says her agent, Susan Wagner.
Price Points: Condos in this building haven’t turned over much; at least one is still owned by the people who bought it in 1994 from LR Realty. There have been at least four sales over $2 million, according to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds, including the highest-priced sale in the building: the $3.275 million that Marlene Iglitzen, the widow of the Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel, paid in August 2008.
Listing Agent: Susan Wagner of Prudential Rubloff; 312-368-3281 or swagner@rubloff.com
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