Lincoln Park classic gets a total makeover

Behind the red brick facade of an 1890s AG亚洲国际游戏home in Lincoln Park, a pair of rehabber-developers have built an almost entirely new house using sleek up-to-the-minute finishes. 

John O’Neill, a Compass real estate agent, and Michael Cordaro, principal of Peerless Development, previously teamed up on a new-construction house in Old Town, which Crain’s featured in this column in early 2019. For their latest effort, they bought an existing vintage building, a Chicago classic that at different times has been a three-flat and a single AG亚洲国际游戏home. 

Starting from scratch inside, they created a large suite of casual spaces in the rear of the main floor, including a family room with a wall of built-ins, and in the front “gave you more of a sitting room than a living room, because people don’t use a living room now,” O’Neill said. “We shifted the space that would go to waste to the back of the house, where it gets used.” 

They detailed the house with stylish finishes, including a distinctive three-layer ceiling molding, a marble wrap for the kitchen hood and frameless glass railings for the stairs from the family room to the mudroom and back door. 

The 4,600-square-foot house on Sheffield Avenue has five bedrooms, a bar with a clever wine storage rack that doubles as a wall sculpture, a large stone terrace at ground level and a second terrace over the garage. It’s coming on the market Oct. 28, priced at $2.5 million and represented by O’Neill. 

The rear part of the house is an addition, which made possible the tall wall of windows seen at the back. The family room, with a 13-foot ceiling, is several steps up from the ground, and in turn a few more steps lead up to this kitchen and informal dining combo. Between the levels are glass railings, giving the space a contemporary open-plan feeling but with the hint of separation. 

The island is wrapped in Caesarstone, and the long banquette contains storage its whole length. 
 

In the front end of the main level is this living room, which although it was intentionally diminished, still includes room for a dining area.

The wide front door is a nod to the building’s life as a three-flat, when the entrances to two different units would have shared that slot. The arched tops of the doorway and windows, also reminders of the building’s history, help infuse the front rooms with daylight. 

Scrubbed of paint, the facade retains some of its 1890s originals, including two arched stained-glass windows above the entry, and traditional stringcourse brick banding. The window bay is a newly rebuilt version of the original, which was decaying when the developers bought the building. 

They paid slightly more than $1 million for the building in early 2019, according to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds. 
 

This photo shows two details that set this design apart from other new AG亚洲国际游戏homes. One is the triple-layer ceiling molding. The other is the kitchen hood, seen above a row of red knobs near the center of the image.

“We’ve looked at a lot of properties in New York to find what we wanted to do here,” O’Neill said. They worked with London Walder Interior Design, based in West Town, on the look.

For the stair rail, they chose a slender metal design that echoes the lightness of several other finishes. 
 

In the main bedroom, the built-ins are as detailed as those in the family room. They’re walnut, with gold handles. This bedroom looks out over the backyard. 

The main bathroom has marble for the floor, a contemporary tile pattern on the wall and a soaking tub. In the shower, through the glass doors at right, is a custom-designed marble bench. 

Another of the bedrooms sits beside the rebuilt historical window bay. 

On the ground floor beneath the family room is this additional entertaining room, fitted out with a bar. What looks like a wall-mounted wood sculpture on the left-hand wall is a wine display area.

Behind the house is a bluestone terrace, with a view of the modern window wall that illuminates the family room, and of the new brick walls made of reclaimed brick from an old Chicago factory. 

The stairs to the deck over the garage are inside the newly built building, rather than attached to an exterior wall. The change is both functional (the steps don’t become treacherously slippery when it rains) and aesthetic. From the family room or the bluestone terrace, there’s no metal staircase to intrude on the view.