List Price: $869,000
The Property: This one-bedroom condo with a big terrace in a new South Loop high-rise is very stylishly finished. Make that stylishly almost finished.

The South Loop residents Roger Klees, a contractor, and his wife, Mary, bought the 1,100-square-foot two-bedroom unit on the seventh floor at Vetro (611 South Wells Street) largely for the 900-square-foot terrace that looks west across a vacant parcel of land and the Chicago River’s South Branch to the old and new main post offices and other local architecture. With the design panache of D+K architects, they turned the space into a one-bedroom condo, in order to have larger living, dining, and kitchen spaces. They built an outdoor kitchen on the terrace beneath an aluminum pergola that matches the buildings exterior, and created some horizontal-running walnut accents on walls, doors, and the mantel. 

But the Kleeses stopped short of installing an indoor kitchen. Where that was supposed to be, there are now plain white walls, with no appliances or cabinetry. The asking price includes a $75,000 allowance for a complete kitchen, which Roger Klees will install either according to the designs he has tacked up on the bare walls, or to the buyer’s specifications.

The rest of the space, as you can see in the video, has real snap, from the entry hall walled with a three-dimensional checkerboard pattern to the rough-textured hand-scraped walnut floors by Birger Juell. In the master bedroom, the ceiling tips down to become a partial wall.

The sellers also have two parking spaces in the building, which are priced together at $60,000. The Kleeses listed the property for sale in March because, Roger Klees says, they have two other homes and decided not to continue finishing this one.

Price Points: “The price is disconnected from anything else in the neighborhood,” says Mario Greco, the sellers’ agent, “because there’s nothing else like this in the neighborhood.” The terrace, one of just three above the parking garage that look west, will most likely retain its view for a long time, as the condo tower proposed for that empty lot is now on hold. With sales slow elsewhere in the building, Vetro’s developer recently sold several units through an auction house, and is now advertising that prices on the remaining unsold units reflect the lower values that the auction established.

Listing Agent: Mario Greco of Rubloff, 773-687-4696; mgreco@rubloff.com. Here is the full brochure.