Wine importer sells $4.5M Lake Forest home at 25% below initial ask

A Lake Forest home of a well-known wine importer sold for $4.5 million this week, after a 25 percent price cut from its initial listing in 2020.

John Terlato, CEO of Terlato Wines, a Lake Bluff-based owner of a luxury wine portfolio spanning Napa Valley, Australia, and the Rhône Valley, sold his Lake Forest house after it spent years on the market. 

The home at 611 East Woodland Road has been on and off the market since 2020, when it was originally listed asking nearly $6 million. Since then, it’s been through four price cuts, which brought it down to its sale price.

The home last sold in 2003 for $4.6 million, marking a slight loss for Terlato, according to public listing data. Nancy Adelman, a Compass agent, represented Terlato and did not respond to a request for comment.

Since the start of the new year, three Lake Forest homes have sold at or above the $4 million price point in the city, including the Woodland Road property, providing much more velocity than the start of last year. In the affluent North Shore suburb, there are four homes for sale asking more than $4 million, with the priciest being the $8.9 million listing at 255 North Green Bay Road. That home returned to the market last month after a price cut of more than $1 million.

Through February last year, no homes in the city had sold for more than $4 million, although by the end of the year Lake Forest was home to one of the priciest residential sales in the Chicago in 2022 when Nancy Hughes, the widow of late filmmaker John Hughes, sold her mansion for $12.9 million, public records and listing data show.

Built in 1929, the 11,000-square-foot home has seven bedrooms and 11 bathrooms. The two-acre property’s amenities include a library, first-floor men’s and women’s powder rooms, a butler’s pantry, a screened-in porch, a sport court, home gym, workshop, outdoor terrace and pool — and, of course, a wine cellar.

The home was designed by Chicago architect Edwin Hill Clark, who designed high-end homes in Lake Forest and Winnetka as well as public buildings and schools across the North Shore. 

Terlato is a family-owned wine importer, vineyard owner and wine marketing company started with a grocery store in Chicago in 1938. The company owns an international portfolio of wines, spirits and non-alcoholic drinks.

The home is one of many to take a price cut to get to a sale in recent months, both in Lake Forest and throughout Chicagoland.

Also in Lake Forest, a lakefront mansion sold for $6 million earlier this month, after 12 years on and off the market.

That home was also on two acres, but had 170 feet of Lake Michigan shoreline. Built in 2003, the 7,600-square-foot property has six bedrooms and nine bathrooms. The property had been on and off the market between 2011 to 2014, before the listing was removed. It was publicly listed again in 2021 for $6.9 million before a price cut brought the property to $6.5 million in 2022.