The CEO of a Deerfield medical company has bought one of architect David Adler’s masterworks, becoming only the third owner of the Lake Forest mansion since it was finished in 1931. The sellers-the developer and lawyer Herb Stride and his wife, Dolores-accepted $11 million for their 30-room house on 6.4 acres overlooking Lake Michigan, a steep cut from the $26 million they were asking when they initially listed it for sale early in 2003. They later dropped their asking price to $19.5 million.

Photography: Chris Guillen

Lake Forest List price: $19.5 million Sale price: $11 million

James Reid-Anderson, the British-born chief of Dade Behring (a manufacturer of medical diagnostic equipment and tests), and his wife, Judith, closed on their purchase of the landmark Georgian this past March. Built of Pennsylvania mica stone, which has a shiny slate look rarely seen in Chicago, the estate is known as the Mrs. Kersey Coates Reed House, after its first owner, Helen Shedd Reed. She was the daughter of John G. Shedd, the second president of Marshall Field & Company.

Adler and his sister, the interior designer Frances Elkins, collected parquet flooring for the home from a château owned by Comtesse duBarry, mistress of France’s Louis XV; lined the library walls with leather; and covered the guest suite’s walls with Chinese silk. The Strides bought the house after Mrs. Reed’s death in the late 1970s; they could not be reached for comment. The new owners declined to be interviewed.

Streeterville List price: $1.595 million Sale price: $1.55 million List price: $1.7 million

Seize the Mies
Sales record in Mies van der Rohe’s lakeshore tower may be short-lived

A penthouse atop one of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s twin modernist landmarks on Lake Shore Drive has set the price record for homes in those buildings-but another home 19 floors below it is now vying to surpass that price.

A combination of four smaller apartments, the penthouse is a 3,400-square-foot space with magnificent views thanks to its 170 feet of floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides of the 880 North Lake Shore Drive building, which was completed in 1951. The sellers bought the penthouse, the north half of the 26th floor, in 2000, when it was “not in good condition,” says their agent, Janet Owen of Sudler Sotheby’s International, and launched an extensive renovation with the architect Robert Kleinschmidt. The result is an airy, minimalist seven-room floor plan that Owen says “makes you want to run home and get rid of all the clutter in your house.”

The unit was on the market for three weeks before it sold for $1.55 million. Because the building is a co-op, the names of buyers and sellers do not appear in public records.

On the seventh floor of the building, a unit with roughly the same configuration-it combines four original spaces in the same way as the penthouse-is now on the market for $1.7 million. It, too, has been renovated in keeping with the Miesian credo of simplicity; the renovation architect was Michael Pado. “This kind of space is so desirable because it is so open and flowing,” says the sellers’ agent, Andrea Tucker, who is also at Sudler Sotheby’s.

A New Lease

As the decade-long frenzy in home buying cools off, Chicago’s residential rental market is finally stepping out of the shadows. “Renting went through a tough time the past four or five years,” says Judith Roettig, the executive vice president of the Chicagoland Apartment Association. “A lot of the people who used to rent were inspired to purchase,” which meant that vacancy rates in rental units neared 20 percent in some parts of the Chicago market. Now, says Roettig, virtually all parts of the metro area are below 10 percent-and at least one developer is preparing to ride the rental wave. At 345 East Ohio Street, Golub & Co. is building The Streeter, a 49-story tower that Golub’s president, Michael Newman, says is targeted to “renters by choice.” With monthly rents at about $2,500, this is a place for “people who can afford to buy a home but prefer the flexibility of knowing they can move on in a year if they want to,” Newman says.

Send tips about high-end home sales to dennis@rodkin.com.