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List Price: $3.265 million
The Property: Everybody likes to bring home souvenirs of their travels. From a trip to Scotland, you might bring back a kilt (like the one I’m wearing in today’s video) or an entire house. That’s how this Wheaton house came to be: it’s a replica of Greywalls, a stone-walled manor home designed by Edwin Lutyens and built in 1901 next to Muirfield, a historic Scottish golf course. In the early 1990s, the oil executive H. Laurance Fuller duplicated the home in an apt location: adjacent to Chicago Golf Club, the first 18-hole course in North America.
The Scotland original is now a hotel, and it’s easy to feel how well that would work while standing in the two-story foyer of the Wheaton replica. With a double staircase cascading down and arched doorways leading off to assorted formal rooms, there’s an abundant welcome here, whether for a traveler or a homeowner.
In one direction is a library with rich millwork, a big fireplace, and views out onto the 1.78-acre grounds. In another is a grandly scaled living room with a beamed ceiling and another fireplace. The third exit from the foyer is through a pair of pocket doors to a broad dining room whose windows frame a view across the home’s terrace and grounds to Chicago Golf.
The seller, Bill Schutz, renovated the kitchen and some smaller rooms around it into a large, up-to-date kitchen and informal dining space. There’s a very large cooking island, handsome cabinetry and millwork, and a big armoire that houses double refrigerators. There’s lots of storage: pilasters that flank the refrigerators pull out to reveal pantry shelving, and there’s a larger pantry around the corner.
In the wing opposite the kitchen is the master suite. Down a long hallway from the living room, it’s got lots of privacy and is surrounded on three sides by views into the grounds and golf course. There are two big dressing rooms and a pleasant master bath.
Four bedrooms are on the second floor, two each on opposite sides of an open room that serves as a big informal family room. Those rooms have nice views of the grounds, which on one side extend about 150 feet from the house to a stone-walled terrace. (Photos of the house in a greener season are here.) A second, much larger terrace is attached to the rear of the house. Big enough for entertaining on a large scale, it can also accommodate smaller gatherings around the fire pit—a spot that I was glad to find, because in a kilt, one’s legs do get cold.
Price Points: Listed for sale in late September, this is the highest-priced home on the market in Wheaton—although there are others in town that may be worth more. In September 2011, I wrote about the house next door, which is still on the market, its price unchanged at $2.35 million.
Listing Agent: Susann Rhoades of ReMax Suburban; 630-651-1970 or info@rhoadesteam.com