List Price: $5.7 million
Sale Price: $4 million
The Property: This contemporary home, designed to accommodate an art collection, was on the market for more than three years before finally selling on February 12th. The new owners, it turns out, are also art collectors and had been looking for a showcase for their own growing collection. What’s more, the new owners’ collection is heavy on glass, a fit pairing for this residence, with its opaque glass out front, its gigantic glass display cases in the living and dining room, the glass walls on the staircases, and the glass catwalk that leads to a top-floor terrace. Gayle Tepper—the Rubloff agent who represented the sellers, Steve and Ruth Durchslag—would not identify the buyers (and their names have not yet appeared in public records). “Their property just became too small to [display] all the art they love,” she says.


This photo from my 2007 story shows the use of the opaque widows to bring light into the space.

As I wrote in November 2007, when the house was priced at $6.575 million, the Durchslags built the house—designed by the architect Perry Janke—in the early 1990s on a wide lot that looks into Lincoln Park. The opaque windows keep out prying eyes, but fill the space with daylight and allow clear views out to the park. This slide show from the Wall Street Journal has some good views from inside, as well.

Although the interior is astonishing—the central atrium is 43 feet high—the house was idiosyncratic enough to be a hard sell. “The floors are all terrazzo, and there are very large open spaces,” Tepper says. “That limited our demographics. It’s not a family-oriented home. There were many people who were taken with the space, but it didn’t suit their needs.”

Price Points: The Durchslags first put the house on the market in June 2006, asking $6.95 million. The final sale price is 57 percent of that amount. “With everything that has transpired in the market, I feel it was good for the sellers,” Tepper says. “They got the highest price the market could bear in this economy.” For 2010, this is the first sale of a single-family home in the city for $4 million or more. There were three in 2009—all of them new construction—and there were six in 2008.

Listing Agent: Gayle Tepper of Prudential Rubloff, 312-368-5959; gtepper@rubloff.com