Analysts are saying that home remodeling should pick up this year, and with rising energy prices a constant concern, it’s smart to factor resource savings into any rehab. At two Chicago homes, green was the key in nearly all aspects of their recent renovations…
List Price: $825,000
Sale Price: $775,000
The Property: Three of the strikes against this 13-room home in a high-end Naperville subdivision are hard to hide: the empty lot on either side of the house and the third vacant lot behind this property’s nicely landscaped quarter-acre…
List Price: $1.299 million
The Property: With its conservative brick and limestone façade, this house—in one of my favorite neighborhoods, the Holstein Park section of northwest Bucktown—doesn’t try to dominate its older neighbors…
With its blocks of classic bungalows and brick two-flats, Chicago Lawn was for decades a Southwest Side bastion of middle-class stability. More recently it had become a glaring example of the devastation wrought by the foreclosure crisis…
List Price: $1.75 million
Sale Price: $1.6 million
The Property: This 18-room Burr Ridge mansion was the home of Christopher Kelly, the former Rod Blagojevich fundraiser who committed suicide in September 2009 just before going on trial with the former governor…
List Price: $4.7 million
The Property: The 1880s charm of this Lincoln Park home is intact in its detailed brick façade and its tall Italianate windows, but a big rear addition opens the home up from the usual beeline-straight city-house floor plan to an L-shape that invites both family living and entertaining…
In 2008, hoping to reassure potential condo buyers that any further slide in the market wouldn’t hurt them, the Kopley Group development company offered a full-price buy-back guarantee on two of its North Side developments. The company’s chief, Nick Kopley, told me then that this was an “absolute, no questions asked” offer; the company made similar comments to the Chicago Tribune and Yo Chicago…
List Price: $1.699 million
Sale Price: $1.475 million
The Property: The rectilinear components of this Wicker Park façade look pieced together as in a jigsaw puzzle—an apt analogy for the home’s piecemeal financial history…
The former Tribune Co. chairman Dennis FitzSimons, on Monday closed on the sale of his house on exclusive Woodley Road outside Winnetka. The 13-room home on a little more than an acre sold for $2.478 million, about 78 percent of the $3.15 million that FitzSimons and his wife, Ann, paid for the home in November 2003…
List Price: $5 million
The Property: This classically styled 12-room mansion on a bluff in Lake Forest that overlooks Lake Michigan has its fine points, and I’ll get to them. But first, a nod to its former resident, the formidable Sarah Wood Armour, who was a key supporter of the Lyric Opera of Chicago for over five decades and the daughter of Robert Wood, who helped build both the Panama Canal and Sears, Roebuck & Co. Mrs. Armour bought the house in 1980 with her husband, the philanthropist and businessman Andrew W. Armour III of the meatpacking family…
