LINCOLN PARK
LIST $2.75 MILLION SALE $2.73 MILLION

Peter Bukowski, the architect/owner of this 22-room house in Lincoln Park, put it on the market in 2009 with a $6.25 million asking price. At the time, he told The Wall Street Journal that he and his wife, Marzena, had decided to sell the 8,650-square-foot home because “all my income is construction- and real-estate-related,” and the slowdown in both fields due to the recession had caused them to “scale back.”

According to the listing sheet, the six-bedroom, five-bath house has an office, a bar, and an exercise room on its third level. Its baroque façade and cascading terraces and balconies framed by heavy balustrades seem grandiose enough for a production of Evita—and we all know how that ended up.

As it turns out, Bukowski had no success selling the house, and this year he lost it to foreclosure. In September, his lender, JPMorgan Chase, sold the house for $2.73 million—or 44 percent of what Bukowski had been asking. Ayoub Rabah of Great Street Properties handled the sale.

According to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds, Bukowski bought the site—a few blocks west of the North Pond Nature Sanctuary—in 2004 for $975,000. The project was mortgaged for $3 million in 2007 and completed in 2008. According to the county recorder, Dan Ratner and his wife, Genevieve Thiers, bought the house. I could not reach them or the Bukowskis for comment.

Send tips about home sales to dennis@rodkin.com.

Photograph: Todd Urban