List Price: $1,879,000
Sale Price: $1,879,000
The Property: The brick, limestone, and wood façade of this Queen Anne-style home is a flirting coquette among matrons on an east Lincoln Park block where the neighbors are all fine homes, but not as confidently decorative as this one. From its painted wooden gable front and cornice supports down through the carved limestone tablets above some windows and a hefty wood-and-glass front door, the exterior is enlivened by an array of textures and colors.

Inside, the seduction continues. Built in 1895, the house has ten rooms on three floors, plus a...

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List Price: $1,879,000
Sale Price: $1,879,000
The Property: The brick, limestone, and wood façade of this Queen Anne-style home is a flirting coquette among matrons on an east Lincoln Park block where the neighbors are all fine homes, but not as confidently decorative as this one. From its painted wooden gable front and cornice supports down through the carved limestone tablets above some windows and a hefty wood-and-glass front door, the exterior is enlivened by an array of textures and colors.

Inside, the seduction continues. Built in 1895, the house has ten rooms on three floors, plus a...

" />

List Price: $1,879,000
Sale Price: $1,879,000
The Property: The brick, limestone, and wood façade of this Queen Anne-style home is a flirting coquette among matrons on an east Lincoln Park block where the neighbors are all fine homes, but not as confidently decorative as this one. From its painted wooden gable front and cornice supports down through the carved limestone tablets above some windows and a hefty wood-and-glass front door, the exterior is enlivened by an array of textures and colors.

Inside, the seduction continues. Built in 1895, the house has ten rooms on three floors, plus a...

" />
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Dennis Rodkin
Sale of the Week—A Lincoln Park Queen Anne
By Dennis Rodkin

List Price: $1,879,000
Sale Price: $1,879,000
The Property: The brick, limestone, and wood façade of this Queen Anne-style home is a flirting coquette among matrons on an east Lincoln Park block where the neighbors are all fine homes, but not as confidently decorative as this one. From its painted wooden gable front and cornice supports down through the carved limestone tablets above some windows and a hefty wood-and-glass front door, the exterior is enlivened by an array of textures and colors.

Inside, the seduction continues. Built in 1895, the house has ten rooms on three floors, plus a...

Read more
On the Market—Georgian on my Mind
By Dennis Rodkin

List Price: $3,625,000

The Property: This Georgian townhouse on Chicago’s Astor Street feels as if it were made for ambassadorial entertaining. The glass-fronted entry door opens onto an entry hall with a marble and ebony floor; from there, a broad staircase leads to a pillared gallery hall that sets the stage for a handsome living room with a trio of Palladian windows and Juliet balconies.

Built in the 1890s—possibly as a Victorian, its selling agent says, and reworked sometime later—the house has 11 rooms and four-plus baths on four stories, as well as a rooftop deck. Two of the four bedrooms...

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This Week on Spike—December 27
By Dennis Rodkin

A nice two-year-old house in northwest Elmhurst, this one sold in early December for $865,000, which is 5.9 percent below what the sellers paid in September 05.

The 2007 sale price was approximately the 2004 value (approximate because this house did not exist then; it's a replacement of a modest ranch). That is what some real estate appraisers are now saying is appropriate--prices from three years ago. As recently as September, appraisers were telling me they were using 2005 prices.

The asking price was $924,900...

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On the Market—A New Home in Lake View’s Instant Neighborhood
By Dennis Rodkin

List Price: $2,275,000

The Property: Situated in a neighborhood of new, high-end homes on a parcel of land in Lake View that was, until six years ago, entirely industrial, this 11-room house has a clean-cut limestone façade, bamboo floors, steel and glass stair rails, and a super-sleek kitchen. But what really grabs the eye is the solid-core wood doors faced with a vertical-striped zebrawood veneer that are used throughout the house, providing a dark accent to an otherwise light interior.

The house has five outdoor decks on four levels, including a spacious party deck atop the garage and two more private decks on opposite sides of a third-floor den with outdoor stairs up to the rooftop. Glass walls extending out to the decks and lots of...

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Housing Bulletin—Who’s to Blame for the Subprime Mortgage Mess?
By Dennis Rodkin

Sometime last spring, when the present subprime mortgage crisis was on hardly anyone's radar screen, one blip showed up at the office of Lisa Madigan, the Illinois attorney general.

Some attorneys who work in Madigan’s consumer protection division had spotted newspaper ads for mortgages that seemed too good to be true—a suspicion confirmed by the attorneys’ subsequent investigation.

One ad in the Sun-Times offered a $250,000 loan for a payment of $656 a month—but made no mention that the only way to get that deal was to take out what’s called a Payment Option Adjustable Rate Mortgage...

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Sale of the Week—Chicago’s Gold Coast
By Dennis Rodkin

List Price: $5,150,000
Sale Price: $4,850,000

The Property: Although 12 years old, this brick home on the Gold Coast still gets called “new construction” by its selling agent, because it is the rare single-family home in the neighborhood that is from any later than World War I. Its exterior was designed to resemble the old-timers, but inside, “you know what’s behind the walls; the plumbing and electrical is all up to date,” says Janet Owen, the agent who represented the sellers in the sale that closed December 3rd. On top of that, because of the extra-deep lot—150 feet compared to the neighborhood’s more typical 100 feet—there is sufficient space for Read more
On the Market—Crown Penthouse at Chicago’s Olympia Centre
By Dennis Rodkin
List Price: $4.3 million
The Property: This two-story penthouse with views of the lake and the city to the north, east, and south is a complete period piece from the late 1980s. The glittery aesthetic of the era shows through in everything from the sleek round-edged cabinetry painted with gleaming auto-body paint to the spiral staircase surrounded with mirrored glass panels and steel supports painted mauve.

The penthouse has an indoor pond, numerous built-in banquettes and tables, shelves of multicolored granite, a tanning bed, and an underlit glass catwalk to the master bedroom...

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