List Price: $799,000
The Property: Although the North Shore has many grandly scaled chateaux, this Highland Park home demonstrates that grandeur can come in medium-size packages, too. All the architectural detail and lavish finishes of some of the area’s finer residences are tucked into an eight-room house designed to feel like a centuries-old home in France’s Brittany region... Read more
U-TURN: For decades, undergraduates at the University of Chicago seemed to live by the ancient notion that scholars must “suffer into learning,” and over time applications and enrollment declined. As a result, school officials have worked to reinvent the place, and today Hyde Park has become a hot destination among students applying to the country’s top-tier colleges Read more
A report last week from CoreLogic showed that 25.4 percent of Chicago-area homeowners with a mortgage are now underwater—they owe more on the mortgage than the house is worth—and another 5.3 percent are near that point. There’s no way of knowing how many of those people will have to sell their homes this year, but if you’re at or near the short-sale line, the first thing to do is pull your head out of the sand... Read more
List Price: $1 million
Sale Price: $900,000
The Property: In 2006, federal marshals seized this 7,400-square-foot, five-bedroom Winnetka house after its owner was charged with selling scores of luxury cars to Chicago gang members for cash as a way of helping them launder millions of dollars in drug profits... Read more