List Price: $3.45 million
The Property: Today’s property is a handsome brick home, once the coach house of a large estate, built in Lake View in 1913. And today’s property is a slick contemporary clad in metal shingles and horizontal-laid wood siding built in the past six years in Lake View…
For a closer look at the house, launch the photo gallery »
List Price: $3.45 million
The Property: Today’s property is a handsome brick home, once the coach house of a large estate, built in Lake View in 1913.
And today’s property is a slick contemporary clad in metal shingles and horizontal-laid wood siding built in the past six years in Lake View.
They’re the same house, viewed from different sides. The front is the original coach house from the Arthur Meeker estate, whose mansion still stands a few doors east. The rear is an addition designed by the architect Chris Talsma for the house’s owners, Dirk and Julie Riekse.
Front and rear come together beautifully in the ground-floor living room, where, as you will see in today’s video, an airy, sunlit space that opens to the backyard has as one large interior wall the structure’s original rear brick and limestone wall.
That modern openness is also present out front, in the living spaces that fill the old coach house. Very large windows (once entrances to the garage) frame views of the big front yard and the neighborhood; inside, the broad space contains the living room, dining room, and a casual seating nook. Except for the façade, all is up-to-date here, including the stacked-limestone fireplace wall.
A few steps up from those rooms are the kitchen and casual dining space, outfitted with sleek cabinetry and a high-end set of appliances. The textures here are noteworthy: there’s the multicolored backsplash of pencil-thin horizontal tile, the stacked limestone of the central fireplace wall, and a wall of rough exposed brick from the original building.
In the addition, beside the new family room, a staircase with cable rails connect to the floor below and the two above. (There is also a narrower staircase in the original building; it was designed for servants, so it wasn’t given any visual flourishes.)
The second floor has three bedrooms, including a large master suite with a fireplace nook, windows looking over the front yard, and a large, spa-like bath. There’s another bedroom in the basement—along with a second family room and a large playroom—and a fifth one flight up from the main bedroom floor. That fifth bedroom has a sheltered balcony from which to look out at other parts of the old estate, including a dramatic new home diagonally across the parcel from this place.
Also on this top floor is a home office or den with another fireplace and access to a large rooftop deck with a view out to a finger of Lincoln Park. Here the home’s two faces come together, with the metal-shingled addition and the deck all surrounded by the brick parapet of the original building.
Price Points: The Riekses, who are planning a move because they have triplet toddlers, paid $1.25 million for the land and the building shell in 2006; Dirk Riekse says that there were additional costs having to do with the breakup of the larger property that aren’t reflected in that. Neither he nor the listing agent, Millie Rosenbloom, would reveal the total cost of renovating and expanding the house. Rosenbloom says that the asking price is “fair for what we have here: almost 6,400 square feet; 60 feet of frontage in a beautiful part of Lake View where you can walk half a block to the park; a two-car garage with an outdoor space; and fine finishes.” The house was taken off the multiple listing service for the holidays and won’t be back on until February 1, but it is actively for sale.
Listing Agent: Millie Rosenbloom of Baird & Warner; 312-980-1517 or millie.rosenbloom@bairdwarner.com