Sale of the Week

Lake Forest’s “Dinky Dump”

List Price: $1,795,000
Sale Price: $1,550,000
The Property: In a town where the elite have long lived in mansions with lyrical names such as Elawa, Bagatelle, and Clinola, this handsome house got saddled with an unfortunate moniker: Dinky Dump. 

Set in the leafy heart of Lake Forest, the place is neither dinky nor a dump. It has 11 mostly large rooms, and their many windows overlook the nearly one-acre grounds. The stucco twin-peaked exterior, the large foyer and stair hall, the fireplaces in the living and dining rooms, the six second-floor bedrooms, and other details make the house a very comfortable place.

But Marguerite Hixon, the home’s second owner—the latest seller was only the third since the house’s completion in 1925—was evidently so irked when her divorce from Robert Hixon forced her to move here from a nearby estate that she christened the place Dinky Dump. The nickname is still on some documents related to the house, says Brad Andersen, the agent who represented the latest sellers, John and Virginia Andersen. (Brad is the nephew of John, a retired Northern Trust executive.) The Andersens bought the house from Hixon in 1974.

Dissatisfied as she might have been, Hixon made few changes in the house. “Since its inception, the house has been very cared for,” Brad Andersen says. “Nobody, thankfully, screwed it up over the years.”

The house was designed by Charles S. Frost, an architect who designed several other homes and a college building in Lake Forest. In Chicago, he designed the structures at the east and west ends of Navy Pier, among other buildings.

Price Points: Brad Andersen says that when his relatives first started planning to sell the house two and a half years ago, he estimated they could price it at $2.5 million. But this spring, when they were finally ready to sell, “they understood that everything had changed,” Andersen says. He ended up pricing the place at $1.795 million, 28 percent off his original estimate. They had a buyer by early June and the sale closed, at $1,550,000, on August 19th. The buyers are not yet identified in public records.

Listing Agent: Brad Andersen of Griffith, Grant & Lackie, 847-234-0816

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