List price: $5 million
Sale price: $4.45 million

The Property: This 13-room mansion in a French Normandy style overlooks the fifth fairway of the Indian Hill Club golf course just outside Winnetka. Sequestered behind brick gates and surrounded by formal landscaping, the house has seven bedrooms, five fireplaces, a library, and a chauffeur’s apartment and other servant rooms that Jean Wright (the seller’s agent) says the new owners will convert to family space. There is a pool and cabana on the nearly two–acre lot.

Built in 1925, the house had belonged to two generations of descendants of Charles B. Schaffer, a Chicago oilman and racehorse owner. It has stood mostly unused for about the past decade, as the second generation-Nancy Neumann Brooker, and her husband, T. Kimball Brooker-decided what to do with it. “They used it as a second home, but only sometimes,” says Wright. “They were having work done on it.” Following his wife’s death in 2003, Kimball Brooker decided to sell. The kitchen and baths, Wright says, “are original-and I mean original.” Renovating them will be pricey: there are five full baths and three partials.

Price Points: Brooker listed the home with Wright in July and got only low-ball offers. “But right after we signed the contract [in early April, for $4.45 million], we had an offer for $5 million, and suddenly two other people were very interested. It’s interesting that it sat there all that time and then suddenly, all this activity.”

Buyer: Not yet identified in public records

Sales Agent: Jean Wright, Jean Wright Realty