List Price: $2.05 million
Sale Price: $2.35 million
The Property: Not yet finished but already sold, this raised 12-room house is super-wide by city standards: a full 40 feet, on a lot that is 43 feet wide. “It’s totally suburban,” says Brent Meder, whose Meder Properties built it, as he walks across the breadth of the first floor’s kitchen and family room, a pairing most often combined front-to-back in new city homes on standard 25-foot lots. This floor plan’s width also accommodates four bedrooms together on the second floor—and they aren’t all strung out in a row, but clustered together in a more collegial layout.

The house is on a rare (for this strictly gridded section of the city) L-shaped block in a part of Ravenswood that’s just west of North Center, just south of Lincoln Square, and just sleepy enough to not yet have a homey designation of its own. Most of the other housing on the block is boxy red brick Georgians on wide lots, nothing like the farmhouse-style frame homes with front porches that line up cheek to cheek on the nearby streets.

This house’s main living rooms have arched openings between them, a shape echoed by the stacked windows on the front second floor, where Juliet balconies will be installed. In all there’s about 5,300 square feet of living space, including a very large rooftop deck and a doggy room and shower near a side door to a dog run.

On the deck, Meder says, there will be a set of solar panels to provide partial power for the house. He has also filled both the interior and the exterior wall cavities with extra-tight insulation. The result: “We’re estimating that the electric bill will run $65 to $85 [a month],” he says—an impressive figure for such a large house.

 Meder had been building the house on spec, but buyers materialized this spring. Ordinarily, a new house wouldn’t be marked as sold until the buyers have taken possession, but Meder says the parties arranged to close the sale before the house is completed with finishes chosen by the buyers. (They are not identified in public records, and Meder would not name them.) The sale closed August 4th.

Price Points: Meder bought the house that used to stand on this lot, a brick Georgian like its neighbors, for $530,000 in 2007; others have sold in the range of $560,000. Within a few blocks of this, where the houses have more of that old-line city home look, prices over $1 million are not uncommon; there have been more than three in the last three years, according to Midwest Real Estate Data. Nevertheless, the great majority of them have been below $1.5million; only two have sold above that line, this one and a slightly larger one that sold for $1.77 million in August 2007.

Listing Agent: Richard Divito, @Properties, (773) 862-0200