List Price: $3,799,000

The Property: This house is the enemy of right angles-and of ordinariness. From its jutting, multi-angled façade to its dramatic central fireplace (whose exposed chimney is a two-story assemblage of panels, tubes, and ribs), the house, built in 1992, refuses to be a vanilla box-although most of the interior walls are a crisp vanilla white.

The sellers, Michael Adamczyk and Ursula Star-Adamczyk (both doctors), commissioned 2MB Design’s Vowtek Bialy to design a “very contemporary, very open” house for a double lot they bought in the early 1990s, Adamczyk says. They wound up with an 8,000-square-foot house with a living room ceiling 24 feet high, a dramatic staircase supported by a slender steel spine, and outside decks on six different levels.

The six-bedroom, five-bath house has granite and wood inlays in its floors, a glass bridge leading to one second-floor bedroom, and a sloping exterior wall dotted with window-sized cutouts. Custom handrails and other unusual touches “were made by my artist friends,” Adamczyk says. Indoors and outdoors overlap: surrounding the central fireplace is a sunken area that resembles an outdoor fire pit, and off the kitchen is a patio with an outdoor cooking area. Every bedroom opens onto at least one deck.

Because of Illinois’ sky-high rates for malpractice insurance, Adamczyk says, he retired from surgery a few years ago and his wife, an ob-gyn, moved to Milwaukee. He plans to join her there when the house is sold. It has been listed on and off since 2005, most recently with Jerry Sider of Coldwell Banker.

Price Points: Sider and Adamczyk both acknowledge that the house will only appeal to people whose taste accommodates its many angles, curves, and layers. The neighborhood, near Clybourn Avenue in west Lincoln Park, has its share of signature contemporary homes-in fact, there’s one next door that’s even more stylized-but there are many more with traditional looks. “Buyers’ taste in architecture seems to be getting more traditional recently,” Sider says, an observation supported by the looks of what’s sold recently in this house’s price range. On top of that, the bathrooms and kitchen, while excellent by 1992 standards, need to be updated; their fixtures are less sybaritic than people want today, and the bathroom colors seem garish compared to today’s muted palette.

Listing Agent: Jerry Sider, Coldwell Banker, (312) 320-4949