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List Price: $4 million
The Property: Although it’s one of the biggest and most eye-catching homes on a Lincoln Park street lined with landmarks, there is very little known about the origins of today’s house. That’s surprising, because someone in the early 1890s did a fine job of creating a distinctive home with a broad façade of rough-hewn stone capped by a turret and a mansard roof.

The interior lives up to the exterior, beginning with a forest’s worth of oak in its window and door trim, two ornate first-floor fireplace mantels, and paneled wainscoting surrounding the staircase and in part of the living room. There are also original sliding pocket doors, leaded glass windows, and, in the foyer’s flooring, modern-day basket-weave parquetry.

The old house is new where you want it to be: the kitchen and baths. The kitchen, done in the 1990s, has a big island, high-end appliances, and enough space for cooking, dining, and more. The master bath, completed more recently, has a monumental floating tub and a walk-in glass-walled shower; the other five full baths and two partials are also recent updates. The sellers, Ruth and Laurence Geller, have “updated and worked on it in stages over the [25] years they’ve been here,” says their listing agent, Millie Rosenbloom.

Commanding a very large lot (40 feet wide and 177 to 194 feet deep, compared to the city standard of 25 by 125), the home has an enormous amount of space both outside and in. As you will see in today’s video, all the main rooms on the first floor are comfortably big—and then you get to the second floor, where another foyer and a living room with a fireplace await. They are part of the master suite that occupies this entire floor; it also includes a library that opens onto a street-facing upper porch, the bedroom (with another fireplace), a morning kitchen, the bathroom, and a 275-square-foot dressing room.

On the third floor there are another five big bedrooms—one with a fireplace and two with glass French doors into the foyer-size hallway—three baths, and a small kitchen. They are reached by the wood-paneled main stairs and look as if they were meant for the original family’s use. The big backyard has a long raised deck, a garden, and a new four-car garage with a covered deck—and Lincoln Park is just three blocks east.

Price Points: A similarly sized home nearby sold in August for $3.115 million. That house, notes Rosenbloom, got quite a bit of its space from a large addition that gave the home an L shape; as a result, she says, it’s floor plan was “stretched out.” Today’s listing has a more compact, circular floor plan, as well as significantly more historical detail still intact.

Listing Agent: Millie Rosenbloom of Baird & Warner; 312-980-1517 or millie.rosenbloom@bairdwarner.com