Three years ago, Stephanie and Bob Walker paid $799,000 for a three-bedroom house on a ridge in the Silverlake section of Los Angeles with a view of the Hollywood sign and the Griffith Park Observatory. This summer, they were camped out in the Barrington home of Stephanie’s mother, having lost a yearlong struggle to hang onto their house in…
List Price: $1,249,900
Sale Price: $1,125,000
The Property: While she was in Chicago last year filming Public Enemies with Johnny Depp, the French actress Marion Cotillard rented this five-room, 2,500-square-foot condo on the fifth floor of an Old Town building…
List Price: $650,000
The Property: On an Oak Park block of mostly traditional, two-story homes, this low, linear modernist house looks like the shy one. It has a long, almost blank brick façade; the only visible breaks are for the entry courtyard and the carport. (There is also a single set of windows, but landscaping hides them from view.)
But that street-front reticence disappears when you get inside, where the house…
For a homeowner whose mortgage has become unaffordable because of a lost job, an interest-rate reset, or some other reason, the prospect of getting the loan’s terms modified sounds good—but the process can be confusing and dispiriting. That’s why a California company led by a veteran mortgage banker has devised…
List Price: $2,449,000
Sale Price: $2,125,000
The Property: The quarterback Brian Griese, who played for the Chicago Bears from 2006 to 2008, has sold his house in Glencoe for $300,000 less than he paid for it in 2006…
List Price: $2,199,900
The Property: The exterior of this ten-room home on a Bucktown corner lot is a strict geometrical composition of glass, block, and aluminum, but you only have to get one step inside to feel it loosen up. There, on a coat closet in the foyer, builder Darek Nisi hung a pair of rough-hewn antique doors from India that counteract the cold or sterile feeling of some exactingly contemporary interiors.
For people selling their homes in this withering sales climate, every little bit might help. One place sellers might not have thought to look for an edge is Google, where there’s also now a new tool for buyers.
On July 8, Google introduced a Google Maps addition that calls up listings for real estate at or near a mapped…
List Price: $1,795,000
Sale Price: $1,475,000
The Property: Tucked into a secluded setting, this 17-room Lake Forest house sold July 8 for 38 percent of the $3.895 million that its sellers wanted for it back in 2007.
But that’s not all…
Trump Tower “apprentice” sells his three-bedroom graystone
List Price: $259,000
The Property: When the great Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed his now-iconic twin residential towers at 860-880 N. Lake Shore Drive, completed in 1951, the small and lightless kitchens and baths were in keeping with the era’s attitude, but they look..
