The Hinsdale home recently sold to Ralph and Patricia Faison

List Price: $5.995 million
Sale Price: $4.5 million
The Property: This 17-room home in Hinsdale has an indoor pool, eight bedrooms and, according to the listing sheet, “four truly epic levels”—which may be the selling agent’s way of saying that the basement pub is as lavish as the hunt room–styled family room. The listing pictures made the house look like the stage of a big-costumed epic film, with its heavy drapes, spiraling stairs, and elaborate wood, wallpaper, and stone finishes. “It’s a great, very opulent, manor-esque house, distinctly different from the Hamptons-ish thing everyone’s doing right now,” says Chris Crawford, the Sotheby’s agent who had the listing.

Set on just less than two-thirds of an acre a few blocks north of Hinsdale’s downtown, the home was completed in 2003 by J. P. McMahon Builders. The company has built many lavish homes in the suburb, including one that sold for $5.2 million in 2008, breaking the record price for a spec house in Hinsdale.

In June 2003, McMahon sold today’s home to Ralph and Patricia Faison for $4,811,500, according to the DuPage County Recorder of Deeds, a few months after Ralph Faison was named CEO of the technology-equipment company Andrew Corp. The Faisons had moved from New Jersey in 2002 when the Orland Park–based Andrew bought Celiant, a tech company cofounded by Ralph Faison, for $460 million. Faison assumed the role of Andrew’s chief operating officer, president, and CEO-designate. In June 2007, Andrew was sold to the North Carolina company CommScope for $2.6 billion. At the end of that year, Faison left Andrew.

At the start of 2011, Faison became CEO of a Philadelphia-area company, Pulse Electronics. In March, the family’s Hinsdale house went on the market at $6.5 million; about three weeks later, the price dropped to $5.995 million.

The house went under contract on December 8 and closed the next day; a quick closing like that suggests it was an all-cash deal, but Crawford would not comment. The buyers are not yet identified in public records, and I could not reach the Faisons for comment.

Price Points: At their initial asking price of $6.5 million, the Faisons were looking to turn a 35 percent profit on their purchase price. But at the time they listed it, prices in Hinsdale were running only about 9 percent above where they had been when the Faisons bought the home in 2003, according to the multiple listing service data Chicago uses for its annual real-estate charts. In the end, the Faisons sold at a 6.4 percent loss.

Listing Agent: Christopher Crawford of Sotheby’s International Realty; 630-323-4800.