Nov 5, 2007

Sale of the Week—Après le Déluge — Winnetka

List price: $3,999,900
Sale Price: $3,550,000

The Property: This two-year-old, 16-room mansion with French styling sits on a secluded site within the already secluded Indian Hill Club, a 90-year-old residential enclave that winds around a golf course in Winnetka. With stone quoining on the exterior corners and a mansard roof, as well as five fireplaces (four of them made of hand-carved stone), a curving staircase, and a cherry-paneled library, this relative newcomer fits in congenially with the refined older houses in this rarefied community of about 80 homes.

The house has many other assets,  including the five bedrooms on the second floor, each with a private bath. The train station is a short walk away, there is golf all around, and, because the house is on the north side of the club—within Winnetka’s corporate limits—any children living there could attend the village’s highly regarded public schools.

Price Points: When it was completed  in 2005, the house notched the highest sale price for Indian Hill Club: $4.15 million, according to the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois. (Since then, four other houses have surpassed that mark, with the most expensive going for $5.5 million last January; other homes in the club may have changed hands privately at higher prices.) The original buyers of this house, John and Cynthia Compton, listed the home for sale in April 2007—at $4.75 million—after John Compton, an executive with a company that operates grocery-store shopping centers, was transferred. The couple later bowed to the realities of today’s tighter market and reduced the asking price to $3,999,900.

But then, in August, the sellers suffered a setback when storms knocked out power at Indian Hill Club for three days. When its sump pump failed, this home’s basement flooded. According to the listing agent, Jane Dearborn, the water caused no structural damage, but it did ruin the basement’s finishes, which included cherry floors; a kitchen, a bar, and a wine cellar; and a bedroom, one full bath, and a powder room. “So then the house was being sold with [the equivalent of] an unfinished basement,” Dearborn says, “and that fact was definitely factored in to the sale price.”  Restoration of the basement could easily cost more than $200,000.

Buyers: Not yet identified in public records

Listing Agent: Jane Dearborn, Hudson Company, (847) 446-9600

Posted at 07:11 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink

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