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List Price: $899,000
The Property: Among the many well-preserved historical homes in the Gold Coast, the one at 1325 North Dearborn Street stands out for its façade, which is graced with 17 Moorish arches, most of them trimmed with blue mosaic glass. Known as the Lucius Mantonya Flats and dating to 1887, the building, designed by Curd Gottig, was originally the single-family home of L. B. Mantonya, a prominent Chicago shoe and boot wholesaler. By the 1920s, the home had been subdivided into apartments. The building now houses three condos, including today’s two-bedroom duplex, which encompasses all of the original home’s main floor and half of its ground floor.

On the main floor, the condo’s living room, bathed in light from the biggest of the keyhole windows, has 11-foot ceilings and a gas fireplace; it is separated from the large dining room by a partial wall, which makes for an easy flow—of both people and daylight—through the rooms. Interior windows pass the light along to the kitchen, and stained glass in a fire escape window picks up the artistry of the façade.

“This was good thinking in the renovations,” says Leslie Bodell, the agent selling the home for Leonard and Luann Mattioli, a Wisconsin couple who have used the condo as a second home. “It opened everything up so you don’t only have light in the front room, like [an old] building can have.”

As you will see in today’s video, the center of the floor plan is the kitchen, with lots of cabinetry, a dining island, and a range nestled into a brick-lined cove. The big master suite at the rear of the main floor occupies what may have been two or three rooms; it has more stained glass, high ceilings, and a pair of French doors that don’t offer much of a view but provide good ventilation. An office off the dining room could easily become another bedroom.

A large suite downstairs includes a big bedroom (with its own entrance from the shared street-level garden out front), a bathroom, a sitting room/foyer, and a laundry room, all with nine-foot ceilings. Other distinctive details include an onion-shaped fireplace in the dining room—possibly an original, given the Moorish character of the façade, or maybe a tribute created during a latter-day renovation—and the graceful curve of the upper walls where they meet the ceiling. But they all play backup to those front windows, which shone even beneath their Depression-era dinginess.

Price Points: The Mattiolis initially put the condo on the market in mid-May, asking $1.050 million. They have since reduced the price to $899,000—which is $41,000 less than the $940,000 the Mattiolis paid for the condo in 2005. The price includes two outdoor parking spaces, and Bodell points out that the assessments are quite low for the neighborhood: $300 a month, on a 2,800-square-foot home (that amount does not cover heat and air conditioning).

Listing Agent: Leslie Bodell of Prudential Rubloff; 312-268-0631 or lbodell@rubloff.com