Love Where You Live

10/31/2025

North Shore Luxury is 🔥

A lakefront mansion in Kenilworth sold for $14.5 million this week, the second-highest price anyone has paid for a Chicago-area home to date in 2025 and by far the highest price in the northern suburb in the 2020s.

Typical of the North Shore lakefront's hot market, the six-bedroom home on a half-acre site on Sheridan Road spent little time on the market. First announced in a July 9 press release, the property hit the multiple listing service Aug. 15 and went under contract Sept. 3.

The asking price was $15 million. The final sale price is nearly 97% of that. Jena Radnay, the Christie's International agent who represented seller Yoanna Kulas, also represented the buyers, who are not yet identified in public records. She declined to comment on them.

The property has 115 feet of private beach on Lake Michigan, with a glass-wrapped cabana building along the beach and stairs leading up the bluff to the mansion.

Read more here: https://www.chicagobusiness.com/residential-real-estate/kenilworth-home-sells-145m-2nd-highest-price-2025?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=soc-own

10/20/2025

Florida House prime dates are starting to fill up! Book now!

10/16/2025

10/09/2025

I have never seen this, have you!??

If nobody has ever reported spotting a UFO west of Lake Forest in Mettawa, that means the occupants' plan to keep it well hidden for nearly 30 years has been successful.

"It's intentional. We've kept a low profile," said Bob Hollar, who since 1996 has owned the circular house that looks like a spaceship at rest among the tall trees along St. Mary's Road.

Set on 5.3 acres, the 5,000-square-foot house has three bedrooms, outward-tilting walls and windows and a roof peppered with circular skylights that, when the light hits a certain way, drop sunbeams into the home that on Star Trek would have been used to transport Captain Kirk and others out to a new planet.

Hollar and Giles, retired from careers in healthcare that had them both at Abbott and her at Searle, have extensively rehabbed the home's interior, including removing a swimming pool that was in the center of the house and replacing bumpy, dusty textured wall and ceiling finishes with a smooth white plaster and yellowing plastic windows with glass.

They turned it from a look that was "Gilligans Island-ish," Giles said, to something more "contemporary and calming." A painter, she's particularly fond of an effect the angled windows have on the interior.

Read more here: https://www.chicagobusiness.com/residential-real-estate/spaceship-house-west-lake-forest-sale-first-time-three-decades?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=soc-own

10/04/2025

The sale marks the Chicago-area’s fourth-highest home sale this year and the town’s priciest since 2022.

10/02/2025

As the temps start to cool, booking your FL vacay sounds better and better. Fall & Winter dates now available! Plus take advantage of booking discounts now for spring Break!

Heated Pool, 2 King Suites- Min to Beaches & IMG

09/30/2025

Check out 3 Brand New Construction Homes in the middle of Lake Forest, IL

Within this remarkable setting, The Woods at Westleigh Farm currently introduces Three Brand New custom luxury residences, each set on a larger, more private lot with expansive floor plans designed for modern living.

09/30/2025

Two more upper-priced mansions on the shoreline in Lake Geneva are adding to the pile of evidence of a seemingly insatiable appetite for homes in the $8 million-and-up range in that desirable slice of Wisconsin.

One is a house on Bayview Drive that debuted in the "coming soon" section of real estate listings Sept. 13 asking nearly $8.5 million. It was first available to be seen by buyers a week later, and then took just two days to go under contract. The contract was signed Sept. 22, listing agent Gina Nocek of Christie's International Real Estate told Crain's.

Next up in the white-hot mansion market on the shores of Geneva Lake is an eight-bedroom 7,800-square-footer on Lake Shore Drive that showed up on the "coming soon" list Sept. 19. The asking price is a little over $9.98 million.

David Curry, the Geneva Lakefront Realty agent representing the new-construction home, said it becomes available for showings today and he's already received calls from interested parties.

Beyond the general explanations that high-net-worth buyers are reaping hefty gains from a healthy stock market and aren't concerned about costly mortgage rates, Curry says he believes there's another factor.

"There's a lot of FOMO driving this voraciousness," Curry said, referring to the "fear of missing out." Friends visit friends at their Lake Geneva homes and "they see it's a way to make their Saturdays better, too," he said.

Read more here: https://www.chicagobusiness.com/residential-real-estate/lake-geneva-sees-out-control-demand-high-end-homes?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=soc-own

08/22/2025

Lake Geneva and the Midwest shorelines are bringing in the ultra luxury buyers and increasing values throughout. Nicole Fabiano Oertel

A waterfront mansion at Lake Geneva that wasn't on the market sold for $10.1 million to a buyer who came along with an offer, trying to snag lakefront property in a hot market where there's little to none for sale.

The house, a six-bedroom, roughly 7,000-square-footer on an acre in the South Shore Club, is the second-highest-priced home sold so far in 2025 in the Wisconsin hub of upper-end lake homes. The highest price, $20 million, went to a 5-acre property that sold in June.

The buyers "have been looking for a home on the lake for about two years," said the agent who represented them, Daniel Hodgman of Coldwell Banker. Bumping up against the lack of lakefront homes on the market, they "started networking to see if someone would sell" a property that wasn't actively for sale.

"There's nothing for sale on the water," said Hans Melges, the Melges Real Estate agent who represented the sellers, so "that's what (the buyers) had to do to get something they wanted."

Read more here: https://www.chicagobusiness.com/residential-real-estate/lake-geneva-mansion-sells-10-million?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=soc-own

08/14/2025

Scenes from Northfield

08/02/2025

IMO, outdoor space is just as important as the indoor space.