Hardware scion’s estate shaves $5M off Lake Geneva’s Aloha Lodge

Lake Geneva’s Aloha Lodge mansion has undergone a $5 million price chop, showing the resort area’s ultra-high-end market long frequented by Chicago’s wealthy has reached a ceiling for now.

The eight-bedroom home, owned by the estate of the late former Illinois Tool Works vice chairman Harold Byron Smith, is now listed at $30 million, roughly four months after it hit the market at $35 million, the Chicago Tribune reported. Despite the price reduction, it’s still the most expensive listing in Lake Geneva by a large margin.

Lake Geneva, though technically not considered part of the Chicago metropolitan area, has long drawn the Windy City’s wealthiest and most powerful people to buy vacation homes. The popular resort town is home to some of the priciest transactions in Chicagoland, including in July when an 8,700-square-foot mansion on Loramoor Drive traded for $14 million, topping all Chicago-area sales so far this year.

That was the most expensive transaction in Lake Geneva since last October, when the 12,280-square-foot home at W3415 Snake Road changed hands for $17 million. The priciest deal ever in the city is the Richard Driehaus estate’s $36 million sale of the Glanworth Gardens mansion in January 2022.

Aloha Lodge is being listed by @properties agent Brandie Malay Siavelis. The mansion has a pool, three-bedroom guest house, a separate 1,800-square-foot building with a model railroad, a greenhouse, five boats and 368 feet of lake frontage. Between the main house and accompanying structures, the 12-acre estate has 11 bedrooms, and 13-and-a-half bathrooms across 20,000 square feet of interior space.

Smith, whose great-grandfather Byron L. Smith founded well-known Chicago area businesses Illinois Tool Works and the Northern Trust Co., bought the property in 1998 and later performed an expansive renovation.

Aloha Lodge was first built in 1901 by Tracy Drake, one of two brothers who went on to found the Blackstone and Drake hotels in Chicago.

— Quinn Donoghue

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