List Price: $2.595 million
The Property: This elegant 12-year-old home in Lincoln Park can also handle a crew of rambunctious kids. Just ask the sellers, Dick and Annie Rothkopf, who raised three kids there and are now downsizing. In fact, it was a teenager who found them the house, back in 1998. The Rothkopfs were then living in a Near North Side condo and looking for a house. “Our son was in ninth grade, and his friend called and said, ‘I saw a house that looks cool. You should buy it,’” Annie Rothkopf recalls. 

They did, drawn by the house’s layout that handily zones formal and informal spaces. It starts on the ground level, where the front portion is a spacious foyer or welcoming room from which stairs ascend to the main floor. There is also a study, a bedroom and other spaces on this level.

On the front portion of the second level, the living and dining rooms have substantial arches and pillars. At the rear, past a cook’s kitchen with Edwardian cabinetry, there is a high-ceilinged family room that opens onto a terrace with two main levels and two smaller sections. An attached two-car garage sits beneath the terrace

The master suite fills the entire third floor, with a large bedroom in front that has a fireplace; past the closets and master bath, there is a loft office space or workout room overlooking the family room. The top floor has two bedrooms in the rear, and in the front, there is a large sunroom or media room next to a landscaped rooftop deck with great views of both the tree-lined street and the city skyline.

Price Points: The average sale price of upper-end houses in Lincoln Park has risen in each of the last three quarters, according to the @Properties Market Report for the neighborhood. The average sale price in the most recent quarter (winter 2009) was $3.205 million, up 2.7 percent from fall 2008. But the number of homes sold for more than $2 million was smaller: only five, compared to 12 in the prior quarter.

Listing Agent: Carol Nevada Duran of Rubloff, 312-368-5963; cdruan@rubloff.com, and www.carolduran.com