Fielding Offers on Prairie Avenue

List Price: $2.1 million
The Property: There’s nothing junior about the Marshall Field Jr. mansion. Now containing six condominiums but once a 43-room house, the red-brick Queen Anne building looms large, both physically and metaphorically, over the most historic stretch of Prairie Avenue…

Decrepit Lake Forest Mansion with Literary and Banking Ties Sells after Four Years

List Price: $3.2 million
Sale Price: $2.25 million
The Property: First listed in 2007 for $6.5 million, this once-grand mansion on five acres in central Lake Forest sold on September 7 for $2.25 million—just 34 percent of the original asking price. Built in 1914, its architect was Arthur Heun, who designed many of the premier mansions in Chicago and Lake Forest…

It’s a Jungle in There—in Riverwoods

List Price: $2.679 million
The Property: It’s like a huge terrarium for humans, this 31-year-old home tucked away in a densely wooded part of Riverwoods. Two-story glass walls mark the boundary between indoors and out, though there is not much distinction between the two realms, with a gigantic rubber tree growing indoors and such outdoor denizens as deer and squirrels frequently wandering up to the windows…

Reclaiming Landmarks

When Art Frigo bought a languishing Chicago mop company in 1987, he’d had no experience with household products. Now the firm, M. B. Walton, has a bucketload of successful new goods, including a fancy broom called the Performer that Frigo shepherded onto the market. In 1989 Frigo jumped into another field where he’d never played—real … Read more

Two Gold Coast Mansion Sales

List Price: $5.75 million
Sale Price: $5.78 million
List Price: $4.75 million
Sale Price: $4.154 million
The Properties: A 13-room mansion on an extra-large lot on North State Parkway sold August 23 for a little more than its asking price—and for nearly eight times what its sellers had paid for the place in 1994…

Shedding Light on Hawthorne Place

List Price: $3.25 million
The Property: With Belmont Harbor at one end and the shopping and dining options of Broadway at the other, the block-long Hawthorne Place is one of Lake View’s great urban streets. But it also feels quite suburban, with big homes built on extra-large lots, mostly in the 1890s and the early 20th century…