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Tag: On the Market
An Old Hyde Park House Remade for Today
By Dennis Rodkin
List Price: $2.25 million
The Property: If you had designed a home in the late 1880s knowing how families would live in 2011, you might have come up with today’s residence: imposing on the outside—all that rough-cut limestone and a pair of turrets—but warm and casual on the inside... Read more
Hooked on the Classics, in Oak Park
By Dennis Rodkin
List Price: $1.048 million
The Property: From its green tile roof to the frieze over the front windows and entry, this Oak Park house offers a classic welcome. Its Mediterranean exterior speaks of the 1930s, but inside, where the grace of that era is still intact in the large rooms, walnut doors, and vintage features, the home has been entirely updated in the past eight years—that is, since the interior designer Amy Calain moved in... Read more
The Time-Traveler’s Life, Lincoln Park
By Dennis Rodkin
List Price: $1.99 million
The Property: Two distinct eras in Lincoln Park’s history—its late-1870s boom years and its 1970s revival—coexist beautifully in this row house. The façade’s decorative cornice and carved window coping are hallmarks of the first era, while inside, the gracefully curved hanging staircase and piano-shaped ceiling of the master bedroom are signs of the second era’s inventiveness... Read more
Big Ben
By Dennis Rodkin
List Price: $2.499 million
The Project: By far the largest home in the St. Ben’s neighborhood, this newly completed mansion fills the shell of a former six-flat apartment building. The builder Bill Varney took advantage of the wide, shallow structure to create a home whose expansive southern façade lets virtually every room bask in sunlight... Read more
A Miniature Chateau in Highland Park
By Dennis Rodkin
List Price: $799,000
The Property: Although the North Shore has many grandly scaled chateaux, this Highland Park home demonstrates that grandeur can come in medium-size packages, too. All the architectural detail and lavish finishes of some of the area’s finer residences are tucked into an eight-room house designed to feel like a centuries-old home in France’s Brittany region... Read more
Loft Takes Its Cue from the West Loop
By Dennis Rodkin
List Price: $1.15 million
The Property: Cue-wielding pool players get some of the best views in this 4,200-square-foot loft in an old West Loop industrial building. Look out one set of tall windows and they get a straight shot of the Sears Tower; look out the other and they see more old industrial buildings and a clock tower... Read more
Going Green in Holstein Park
By Dennis Rodkin
List Price: $1.299 million
The Property: With its conservative brick and limestone façade, this house—in one of my favorite neighborhoods, the Holstein Park section of northwest Bucktown—doesn’t try to dominate its older neighbors... Read more
This Lincoln Park Home Was Brought to You by the Letter “L”
By Dennis Rodkin
List Price: $4.7 million
The Property: The 1880s charm of this Lincoln Park home is intact in its detailed brick façade and its tall Italianate windows, but a big rear addition opens the home up from the usual beeline-straight city-house floor plan to an L-shape that invites both family living and entertaining... Read more
An Armour Mansion in Lake Forest
By Dennis Rodkin
List Price: $5 million
The Property: This classically styled 12-room mansion on a bluff in Lake Forest that overlooks Lake Michigan has its fine points, and I’ll get to them. But first, a nod to its former resident, the formidable Sarah Wood Armour, who was a key supporter of the Lyric Opera of Chicago for over five decades and the daughter of Robert Wood, who helped build both the Panama Canal and Sears, Roebuck & Co. Mrs. Armour bought the house in 1980 with her husband, the philanthropist and businessman Andrew W. Armour III of the meatpacking family... Read more