Photo: Dennis Rodkin
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List Price: $869,000
The Property: Fall Out Boy guitarist Joe Trohman and his wife, Marie, put their two-bedroom, three-story Lincoln Park townhouse up for sale Tuesday.
Trohman bought the interior unit in the Embassy Club development in 2006 for $685,000, according to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds. Tim Salm, the Jameson Sotheby’s agent representing the condo, declined to discuss the sellers but said they had “re-done the entire space, top to bottom” before moving in. The eventual buyer, Salm said, will “basically get a brand-new unit within the original Embassy Club,” which when built in the late 1980s was thought of as bringing a London-style mews to the rapidly gentrifying West DePaul area.
In 2007, Trohman led MTV’s Cribs on a tour of the home, where he showed off such design flourishes as a living room rug made of treated Barbie hair, the spring-loaded drawers in the kitchen, Space Invaders decals on the wall behind his bed, and tree-themed wallpaper in the family room. “Get lost in the forest, you know,” he said about that last one. Trohman also pointed out how some “terrible, terrible” white built-ins got converted into additional closet space.
Salm would not say how much the renovations cost, so it’s not clear how much—if any—profit Trohman is asking for with his $184,000 markup from his purchase price.
On a tour of the home Wednesday afternoon, I saw most of what Trohman had pointed out on Cribs, except for his guitars, his toy collection and a wall of moss surrounding a crucifix. “That was taken down” for showings to potential buyers, Salm said.
In the renovations and decorating, led by Lisa Ewing, a wall that concealed the staircase was opened up and given a more open and industrial look, the master bedroom fireplace got a glass mantel, and the kitchen became a sleek showpiece. Appliances and cabinetry behind crisp espresso-finish doors, white tops, and a stylized tile backsplash make it “five times the kitchen that the original developers put in here,” Salm says. “You have cabinets for days.”
The main living floor is one flight above ground and contains living, dining, and kitchen. There are two bedrooms and two baths upstairs, all finished in the same glamorous style as the main floor, and on the ground floor is the garage, another full bath, and the family room. Out back is a fenced garden of lawn, stone, and succulents.
“I’m pretty much a kid at heart,” Trohman said in the Cribs segment after pointing out his toys and decals and such.
More recently, in June, in an interview around Save Rock and Roll, the band’s first album in four years, Trohman said that in the recent past “I’ve had my own band, I got married, I have a dog, and so, yeah, now Fall Out Boy is back. I really don’t have anything to properly complain about.”
Trohman told Chicago magazine in early 2011 that he was already thinking of selling the townhouse and buying in New York, “but Chicago will always be my home base.”
Listing Agent: Tim Salm of Jameson Sotheby’s International, 312-545-6753 and tim@timsalm.com