This 120-Year-Old Gatsby-esque Mansion Near Chicago Can Be Yours for $15 Million
Lake Forest, a leafy suburb that’s long been a haven for Chicago’s wealthiest residents, is home to some of the Midwest’s most historic architecture and expensive real estate, including homes designed by noteworthy architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Howard Van Doren Shaw. The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald considered Lake Forest to be one of the most magical places in the world, and, so the stories go, it was a Shaw-designed home in the affluent community that inspired his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.
Another of the city’s vintage estates, located on nine verdant acres along East Rosemary Road, recently hit the market for $15 million. Owned over its 120 years by several prominent families, the Georgian-style mansion was designed in 1904 by influential Chicago architect Benjamin H. Marshall, who also designed Chicago’s Drake Hotel. It was originally built for John Pirie Jr. of the department store chain Carson Pirie Scott & Company and was later owned by the Armour family. The current owner is octogenarian billionaire businessman John Krehbiel Jr., who bought the main residence with his late wife, Kennetha “Posy” Krehbiel, in 1988. The Krehbiels later added two adjacent properties to the elegant estate.
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The main residence and the various structures across the property are an elegant pastiche of styles, mixing the stately Georgian in style with elements of the iconic Prairie School that originated in Chicago in the 19th and 20th centuries and is known for its horizontal lines, hipped roofs with overhanging eaves, and integration with the natural surroundings. There are also Italianate influences, like Tuscan and bowed windows.
Altogether, there’s a total of almost 12,000 square feet of living space with eight bedrooms, eight full bathrooms, and two half-bathrooms split between the main house, an attached coach house, a guest house, the pool house, and a light-filled conservatory.
The red-brick main house is encrusted in manicured vines covering nearly every inch of the front facade. Inside are several traditional living rooms with patio access, a formal dining room with built-in china cabinets, an airy breakfast nook with tile detailing, a family room wrapped in patterned wallpaper, and a wood-paneled office/library with soaring ceilings. Most of the spacious en suite bedrooms feature large windows, a seating area, generous storage, and a fireplace.
The grounds were originally designed by Rose Standish Nichols in the 1920s, who had an intriguing life as a suffragist, peace activist, and landscape architect who worked with prominent architects around the country. Since updated and added to, there are 21 outdoor “rooms.” The sellers’ love of the natural environment and gardening led them to tap a number of landscape architects from around the country, including Tom and Kirsten Beeby, Deborah Nevins, Frank Mariani, Craig Bergmann, and P. Clifford Miller. A private, meticulously maintained park-like idyll that awes at every turn, the various “rooms” feature millefleur seasonal garden beds, long-term mixed plantings, manicured hedges formed into exquisite curved shapes, trees, espalier trees, and a wooded ravine garden, among others.
Its location puts the historic estate in convenient proximity to Lake Michigan and many walking, hiking, and biking trails, along with the shops and restaurants in downtown Lake Forest and several tony country clubs in the area.
Click here for more photos of the Chicago area home.
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