List Price: $449,000
The Property: A three-bedroom loft condo in a century-old Chicago commercial building with red-brick flourishes on its arches, this home suddenly added a cool tidbit to its profile last week. On January 29th, the Chicago Tribune’s Patrick Reardon wrote in the paper’s Tempo section about buildings around the city that had appeared over the years in different movies. Reardon’s lead example was an old triangular building at Milwaukee Avenue and Noble Street—Chicago’s Noble Square neighborhood—that played a small role in the 1948 film noir docudrama Call Northside 777...

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List Price: $449,000
The Property: A three-bedroom loft condo in a century-old Chicago commercial building with red-brick flourishes on its arches, this home suddenly added a cool tidbit to its profile last week. On January 29th, the Chicago Tribune’s Patrick Reardon wrote in the paper’s Tempo section about buildings around the city that had appeared over the years in different movies. Reardon’s lead example was an old triangular building at Milwaukee Avenue and Noble Street—Chicago’s Noble Square neighborhood—that played a small role in the 1948 film noir docudrama Call Northside 777...

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List Price: $449,000
The Property: A three-bedroom loft condo in a century-old Chicago commercial building with red-brick flourishes on its arches, this home suddenly added a cool tidbit to its profile last week. On January 29th, the Chicago Tribune’s Patrick Reardon wrote in the paper’s Tempo section about buildings around the city that had appeared over the years in different movies. Reardon’s lead example was an old triangular building at Milwaukee Avenue and Noble Street—Chicago’s Noble Square neighborhood—that played a small role in the 1948 film noir docudrama Call Northside 777...

" />

List Price: $449,000
The Property: A three-bedroom loft condo in a century-old Chicago commercial building with red-brick flourishes on its arches, this home suddenly added a cool tidbit to its profile last week. On January 29th, the Chicago Tribune’s Patrick Reardon wrote in the paper’s Tempo section about buildings around the city that had appeared over the years in different movies. Reardon’s lead example was an old triangular building at Milwaukee Avenue and Noble Street—Chicago’s Noble Square neighborhood—that played a small role in the 1948 film noir docudrama Call Northside 777...

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List price: $1.95 million
The Property: One hundred years old in 2008, this 14-room Prairie-style home has been thoroughly renovated and updated but at no cost to its original character, which comes from five-piece banded molding in the main rooms, a massive fireplace bricked in a herringbone pattern, and numerous windows on three sides (a rarity in Hyde Park’s older attached houses). The Tudor look of the beamed upper and brick lower portions carries through this and four other houses built on this corner in a Hyde Park “Professors’ Row” cluster. The architects of the cluster, Tallmadge & Watson, were among the leading Prairie architects—in fact...

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List Price: $1,049,000 each
The Properties: These two sleek houses are the design of Studio Dwell Architects. Behind their almost-identical cedar and glass facades, they have spacious floor plans, sharp Arcilinea kitchens, and top-floor master bedrooms with exquisite views of two local landmarks: the gold dome of Sts. Vladimir and Olga Church and the multiple copper spires of St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral.

Each house has a big double-height front room that combines living and dining with an almost vertiginous view up two flights of stairs. Beyond are a kitchen and...

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List Price: $8,595,000

The Property: In 1977, Ronald and Carole DeBruin bought three lakefront acres in Lake Forest that had once been part of Villa Turicum, the 269-acre estate of Harold and Edith McCormick, both children of enormously wealthy fathers. (Harold was the youngest son of Cyrus McCormick, who invented the mechanical reaper that was the foundation of International Harvester; Edith, the original benefactor of Brookfield Zoo, had John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, for a father.) The DeBruins built this elegant 13-room house, which has five bedrooms, a 52-foot-wide entry hall, and a family room that opens onto a bluestone terrace and oversized hot tub. But the real attraction may be...

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List Price: $1.695 million
The Property: From its triangular floor plan to its hanging chimney, internal balconies, and master bathroom tiled in black polka dots, this Wilmette house built in 1981 is a study in unconventional design. The work of the late Marion Gutnayer—a University of Illinois architecture professor whose own even more unusual home is just a block away—this four-bedroom house has a big eight-sided living room whose brick walls shut out the sight and sound of the busy street outside, while its tall, slender windows frame views of trees and garden space. Upstairs loft spaces near two children’s bedrooms overlook the living room, and they are matched in the rear of the house by a broad balcony off the master bedroom that looks out over the glass-walled family room and into the yard. There is also a wide spiral staircase, vertical cutouts in some brick walls, a large-panel terrazzo floor, and...

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List Price: $829,900

The Property: This two-story penthouse condo at the top of the 101-year-old Mentor Building (at 39 South State Street) has three bedrooms plus an office, a stylish kitchen, and striking views of the surrounding architecture. Windows in the condo’s lower floor look out between some of the columns that give the building’s upper reaches the look of a temple-in-the-sky. (The condo’s upper level, where the three bedrooms and two full baths are, is on a floor concealed from street-level view.) Views stretch north all the way to the new Trump building; what’s more, those views can never be blocked because...

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List Price: $2.29 million

The Property: This ten-room brick house was the home of Mike Ditka and his wife, Diana, from 1989 until he left Chicago to coach the New Orleans Saints in 1997. The Ditkas had bought the house—one of about a dozen on a forested cul-de-sac—new from the builder for $1.2 million. Set on more than two densely wooded acres and surrounded by a high brick wall, the 3,500-square-foot house has four bedrooms, four-plus baths, four fireplaces, and a swimming pool. The basement has a wine room, an exercise room, and...

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List Price: $6.575 million
The Property: Pointedly opaque to passersby, this three-story, 6,300-square-foot house opens up inside as a series of light-bathed rooms whose walls and ceilings, staircases and cabinetry appear to float past and through one another. Designed by the architect Perry Janke and completed in 1992, the house has at its center a 43-foot-high atrium, with steel staircases climbing its sides, assorted rooms overlooking it through glass or through wall cutouts, and a roof terrace at the top. Hung throughout is the sellers’ collection of art, including a sculpture of a woman walking a tightrope 30 feet above the living room.

The house’s exterior windows use a commercial-grade glass that from the outside appears to be covered with a dense screen but is transparent from the inside. “We wanted to see [Lincoln Park] without having the park see us...

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List Price: $1.299 million

The Property: Perched on a hilltop in St. Charles, this 16-room house was built in the mid-1960s for a psychiatrist who didn’t care for air conditioning. That and the oak woods all around prompted the architect Robert Cantrell to create a series of rooms that jut out from one another, thus maximizing both the natural ventilation and the views. Energetic and angular, the all-white house appears to sprout from its hillside site...

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List Price: $3.199 million

The Property: This new 8,500-square-foot house with a deep lot is nearing completion on a curving street in Clarendon Hills. Built by Double Diamond Developers, the house has 16 rooms, including a 3,000-bottle wine room and, off the kitchen, a small "chef's office" that the listing agent, Bryan Bomba, says "would be a good time-out room for one of the kids."...

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