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List Price: $2.89 million
The Property: This new mansard-roofed house just completed on a tree-lined block in Lake View is very large—6,500 square feet inside including six bedrooms. But the more noteworthy dimension is its width. The lot it’s built on is extra wide, 37.5 feet, while the conventional lot in the city is 25 feet. The builder, Barrett Homes, has taken full advantage.

It’s not only about the expanse; it’s also about details. That’s clear right from the foyer, which has a library on one side and the living room on the other. The house is very well finished, from wainscoting seven feet high in most places, including the second-floor hallway, to substantial door and window frames and curved crown moldings. In the library, the built-ins and wainscoting are dark wood, but elsewhere throughout the house the wood is all done in a neutral tone for a grand, classic look. That’s particularly true in the dining room, where a banker’s beamed ceiling hangs overhead.

On the informal end of the main floor, the house opens up to a combination of family, informal dining, and kitchens spaces. This is a big daylit area, with a lot of the grandeur from out front carried through: nice beams in the ceiling, great millwork around the fireplace, well-made cabinets, and a custom-built kitchen hood that has a sort of Edwardian flair.

There are a lot of great details to see, but there are also some that are hidden—like the kitchen drawers, which, when pulled out, reveal they’re made of sturdy walnut. Other details that aren’t visible but make the house work well are a whole-house automation system; super-tight insulation in the walls, and then, to make sure the house breathes well, a circulation system that brings in fresh air and lets out stale air; and snow-melting radiant heat under all the patios, sidewalks and steps. Not that the homeowner will care too much about snow, because there’s an enclosed, weather-proof passage from the house to the garage, a rare accommodation by city zoning.

On the bedroom floor, the benefits of the home’s width are first visible at the front, where three family bedrooms, rather than being strung along like boxcars, are clustered together for a homier feeling. (There are two more bedrooms in the basement, as well as a bar with cabinetry of the same quality as in the kitchen, a nice sitting room, and a 500-bottle wine cellar.) At the rear of the floor, the master suite spans the home’s full width. There’s a a large bedroom on one side capped by the crown moldings seen downstairs, but here the wainscoting rises all the way to the ceiling to become paneling. Next door is a very large master bath that features a huge tube and an even larger glass-walled shower.

One flight up, the penthouse has a large front room with a nice view into the trees, and a second room that would make a nice yoga studio or additional bedroom. But most of this level is given over to a vast rooftop deck; the only thing bigger here is the wide view of the lakefront skyline.

Price Points: Builder Mike Barrett has completed and sold several homes in the over $1 million range. This is one of a few he has done over $2 million. The step up included both a higher-end decorative package and substantially more technology inside the walls. “We feel like we put it all in here,” he says. “We wanted it to still look good and work well for [the homeowner] 20 years from now.”

Listing Agent: Jamie Connor of Conlon, 773-339-1439, jconnor@conlonrealestate.com