Willis Tower, John Hancock architect's house could be yours
Dennis Rodkin
James Kinney, Baird & Warner
Famed Chicago architect Bruce Graham designed this Lincoln Park house for himself and his wife.
The Lincoln Park house of Bruce Graham, architect of the Willis Tower, the John Hancock Center and the Inland Steel Building, came on the market yesterday with an asking price of $3.8 million.
The 4,000-square-foot home on Cleveland Street, which Graham designed, presents an austere concrete face to the street, but "when you get inside, there's a wonderful interior courtyard surrounded by glass," said James Kinney, the Baird & Warner agent representing the house. "It's very calming; you could be anywhere, it's so Zen."
The house was built in 1968, when the Lincoln Park neighborhood was early in the transition from working-class to its present affluent state; warding off passersby with a blank concrete exterior was not only stylish then but pragmatic. Graham and his wife, Jane, sold the house in 1989 for an amount that is unclear in the Cook County Recorder of Deeds documents.
Four years later, the house sold again, for $1.26 million, to James and Rita Knox, the present sellers, according to the recorder's office. The couple is traveling and not able to provide comment, Kinney said.
The house has an interior courtyard.
Bruce Graham died in 2010. An obituary in the New York Times credited Graham's work for Skidmore Owings & Merrill on the Sears (now Willis) and Hancock buildings as reasserting Chicago's "pre-eminence as a world architectural capital."
The Knoxes commissioned architect Dan Wheeler to renovate and update the home in the 1990s. "They wanted it done in the original style of the house," Kinney said. Photos that accompany the listing for the home show marble floors, built-in wood cabinetry and wall-sized windows to the courtyard.
Several sculptures stand in the courtyard. Kinney describes both the outdoor space and the interior as "a piece of art for holding art. Someone who wants to frame a collection would love it."
Situated on a 50-by-119-foot lot, the home has four bedrooms on the second floor and four full baths. Kinney's listing notes that current zoning would permit an expansion of the house.
The home was updated by architect Dan Wheeler in the 1990s.