Farewell to $17M Lake Geneva mansion

Boaters can say goodbye to one of Lake Geneva’s most storied residential gems, soon to be replaced by another following a teardown on the waterfront in this ritzy Chicago-area vacation town just north of the Wisconsin border.

It was deemed that the 20-acre site off Snake Road, bought for the town’s second-priciest sale ever at $17 million in October, needed a boat-load of repairs and it would be more cost-effective to start from scratch, the Chicago Tribune reported. Lake Geneva-based Scott Lowell Homes is at the helm of construction.

James Conlon, the previous owner of Elite Manufacturing Technologies, purchased the estate back in October. It originally belonged to members of the Swift meat-packing family dating back to 1906, when the 12,400-square-foot main structure was first built.

The teardown marks one of the priciest residential demolition projects ever in the Chicago area. The property featured three houses, a service building and 500 feet of lake frontage. The main mansion, where clearance has already begun, was built as a Mediterranean-style villa with stucco and clay-tile roof and has been known as Villa Hortensia.

The newly constructed site will also feature three homes, Lowell said. Lowell appointed in-house architect Todd Cauffman to oversee the project, and said the new houses will be in a style that is traditional and appropriate, the outlet reported.

Even renovating just the main house would cost “millions of dollars more” than to start anew, Lowell said. Some structural elements from the original villa will remain as construction ensues, however.

The property was originally listed at nearly $21 million when it hit the market in 2021, and sold for about $17 million more than a year later. Lake Geneva’s priciest-ever sale occurred next door when billionaire beer and food distributor J. Christopher Reyes bought Richard Driehaus’ estate for $36 million last year.

Members of the Swift meatpacking family owned the estate until 1997. It remained in the hands of another family with Wisconsin ties, the Macdonalds, until Conlon’s recent purchase.

— Quinn Donoghue

This story was updated to credit the Chicago Tribune with first reporting the demolition.