The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

So long, Frank Lloyd Wright

Architects may come and architects may go, but usually their houses sell for more than the value of the land alone:

Twelve and a half years after it went up for sale, a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Elmhurst sold yesterday for about the value of the land it’s on.

Built in 1901 and known as the Frank B. Henderson house, the five-bedroom, 5,500-square-foot house on Kenilworth Avenue sold for $825,000. It first came on the market in September 2007 at nearly $2 million.

The house won’t be demolished. An easement in the deed prohibits that, and the buyers are longtime Wright fans who confirmed to Crain’s today that they plan to move in. Nevertheless, the sale of a work by the 20th century’s best known architect, a house filled with his distinctive patterned windows, banded woodwork and oversized brick fireplace, for the mere value of the land is notable.

It’s the latest evidence of the ongoing phenomenon of artful Wright houses selling for below the overall market. The Elmhurst sale comes on the heels of the December sale of a Wright house in Glencoe at a little more than half the going rate for comparably sized homes in the town.

The house is on a 22,800-square-foot 2,200 m² lot, which breaks the sale price out to $375 per m². In January, a church a block away sold a buildable piece of its parking lot for $447 per m² to a family who plan to build a new house there.

Five other pieces of land or obsolete houses sold as teardowns, all in Elmhurst, have sold for between $208 per m² $20 and $479 per m² in the past several months, according to Crain’s analysis of real estate records.

Having toured a few Lloyd Wright houses, I know why: they're dark, weirdly laid out, hard to maintain, and often come with uncomfortable furniture he designed to fit in the houses. I'm not alone in thinking he was overrated, being too inflexible and narcissistic to listen to people who knew more about living spaces than he did. It's like he took the prairie style developed by his mentor, Louis Sullivan, and took it to such an extreme that no rational person would want to live in one.

So, great news for the buyers who got the house for a song. They will own it for about 10 years longer than they want to, I'd wager.

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