List Price: $849,000
The Property: I felt an urge to ring for the butler and have him fetch my tuxedo as I toured this elegant four-bedroom home in a 1926 co-op building near Belmont Harbor. The expansive floor plan takes you back to the glamour of the Jazz Age, and a recent renovation updated the home’s mechanicals while polishing up its vintage character.

The L-shaped unit, entered through a foyer with an arched ceiling, has three bedrooms—one used now as a library or den—and a living room strung along Lake Shore Drive (new, heavily insulated windows block out the road noise). The big dining room overlooks the quieter Cornelia Avenue and the Art Deco detailing of Temple Sholom. The kitchen, a fourth bedroom, and an elongated butler’s pantry are on the interior of the building, but those first two spaces get natural light from windows that face an open service core.

Last year, the seller, Sarah Beardsley, bought the unit for about $295,000 from its longtime owner, who had done little to update the place, says Beardsley’s agent, Steve Acoba. (Because the building, at 3500 North Lake Shore Drive, is a co-op and not a conventional condominium, county records do not detail the purchase.) Beardsley, says Acoba, then sunk about $500,000 into renovations that included dismantling, stripping, replacing, and augmenting the unit’s millwork; installing air conditioning; upgrading the bathroom fixtures; redecorating the elevator lobby this unit shares with a neighbor; and combining a smallish kitchen with a second maid’s bedroom to make a big new kitchen. By the time the renovations had been completed, Acoba says, Beardsley had “decided to live somewhere else.”

Price Points: Two condos in the same tier (or floor plan) as this residence were sold in 2007. Unit 8C went for $915,000, and 10C was sold for $845,000. According to Acoba, both units had new kitchens and new air conditioning, but neither had the extensive new and rehabbed millwork or gut-rehabbed bathrooms of today’s featured property.

Listing Agent: Steve Acoba of Keller Williams, 773-968-9107; steveacoba@ameritech.net.