Don Erickson-designed suburban Chicago home hitting market for $1.75M

Architect Don Erickson designed home in late 1960s

Lou Zucaro, Broker & Realtor (Baird & Warner Real Estate, VHT Studios)
Lou Zucaro, Broker & Realtor (Baird & Warner Real Estate, VHT Studios)

A modernist suburban Chicago home designed by architect Don Erickson in the 1960s is hitting the market for $1.75 million.

The home on Old Green Bay Road in Winnetka, a suburb that borders Lake Michigan north of the city, has brick floors in places and a primary bedroom with windows on every side of the room, Crain’s reported. “There are so many details to look at,” Lou Zucaro, the Baird & Warner agent who will represent the home when the listing goes live on Feb. 15, told Crain’s.

The home is on two-thirds of an acre, has five bedrooms and almost 5,000 square feet on the main floor, in addition to a finished basement. Much of it consists of natural materials, including cedar ceilings, redwood beams, brick walls and oak floors. “Don Erickson didn’t use drywall if he could avoid it,” Zucaro told Crain’s.

Erickson was a disciple of celebrated architect Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1940s and 1950s, and died in 2006, according to a Chicago Tribune obituary.

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“Don considered Mr. Wright a second father,” his wife Patricia told the newspaper. “It was a very powerful time in his life.”
Zucaro, who focuses on modernist homes, represented another Erickson-designed home, at 507 Park Plaine Avenue in Park Ridge, a northwest suburb, that sold in December for $900,000, according to Zillow.

Zucaro wrote on his website that Erickson is “easily my favorite local modernist architect,” after the late architect’s 10-acre Barrington estate that included his own mansion was seized by a lender in 2018. His widow had sold it to an owner who made extensive renovations.

Another Erickson home in Inverness, another northwest Chicago suburb, totaling 3,700 square feet in a four-bedroom, three-bathroom design sold for $560,000 in December 2020, Zillow shows, down from the initial listing price of $594,500.

[Crain’s] – Sam Lounsberry