Jan 19, 2009

Sale of the Week

Sale of the Week: Let the Sun Shine In, Lincoln Park

List Price: $3 million
Sale Price: $2.925 million
The Property: On a street in Lincoln Park where the homes are tightly packed, this very contemporary house appears to stretch out comfortably in all directions. That’s thanks in part to its unusual lot—90 feet wide by 99 feet deep, compared to the city norm of 25 by 125—but also to the work of its designer, the noted architecture firm of Krueck + Sexton.

In 1994, the current sellers, who are not named in the property records, paid $650,000 for the last three lots owned by the developers of the Embassy Club, a collection of upscale townhouses. They commissioned the architects Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton to design a 6,500-square-foot home for the site. The home’s façade (its west side) distinguishes itself from the ornate, old-style Embassy Club façades with its flat brick wall interrupted only by a single stack of windows and a yellow-topped entry cube.

The entire south wall of the house is glass, and that’s the key to the place,  says Mark Sexton. “It’s all for the light,” says the architect, whose firm is known for such glassy projects as the new Spertus Institute on the western edge of Grant Park and the controversial Children’s Museum proposed for the north end of the park. (The firm is also one of four finalists for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C.)

For this house, says Sexton, his clients liked the “modernist idea to live in transparency and openness, enjoying the entire house all together, instead of a series of room after room after room.” The floor plan, he adds, puts a two-story family room at the center of the space, with living rooms around it on the first floor and three bedrooms looking over it from the second. “They all share the light,” Sexton says.

Interior photos from the listing sheet that a real-estate agent provided (but that I can’t publish here) show that the second-floor rooms seem to float above the first floor, and that clear glass doors separate some rooms. The overall feeling they were going for was “open flowing space,” Sexton says.

The north wall of the house is essentially windowless since the entire orientation of the home is toward the sun. But taking advantage of the lot’s width (and making up for the lack of an alley), the architects put a three-car garage on that side. “You get that suburban garage but in an urban neighborhood,” Sexton notes.

The sale closed January 6th. The buyers are not yet named in public records.

Price Points: There is hardly any comparable property in the nearby neighborhood, given this home’s full-size private yard. Based only on the 6,500 square feet of living space, the sale price here comes to $457 a foot, compared to $296 next door at the very chic Embassy Club—but then, those townhouses have significantly less outdoor space and indoor daylight.

Listing Agent: I was unable to track down the name of the agent.

Posted at 07:15 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink

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