Glencoe Homes Sells for $9.2M

Modernist architecture and Lake Michigan views fetched one of the biggest home sale prices in Chicagoland yet this year.

A striking modernist home perched on a bluff in Glencoe has sold for $9.2 million — the highest price paid for a single-family residence in the North Shore suburb in over a decade, Crain’s reported.

Sellers Jane and Dennis Carlton closed the Wednesday, transferring the five-bedroom home at 21 Lakewood Drive home to a buyer not yet identified in public records. The 2.23-acre lakefront property, designed by renowned Chicago architect Tony Grunsfeld around 2000, was initially listed in October for $10.9 million and went under contract in February.

Baird & Warner agent Annette Blumberg had the listing, and Linda Levin of Jameson Sotheby’s International Realty represented the buyer.

The 8,574-square-foot home includes a pool and patio, a circular driveway and three-car garage. The price comes out to about $1,073 per square foot.

Built as a custom residence by the Carltons after they purchased the site in 1998 for $2.16 million, the home is a signature of Grunsfeld’s modernist style. It features a flowing, open design with stark white plaster walls, tall black-framed windows, a sculptural staircase and an angular fireplace wall that anchors the living space.

Though the lot sits above the Lake Michigan shoreline, there is no direct beach access — a forested bluff separates the home from the water — but the sellers had previously suggested a buyer could pursue permits to develop the shoreline. Glencoe’s municipal beach is a block away.

At $9.2 million, the sale is not only Glencoe’s priciest residential transaction since Eric and Elizabeth Lefkofsky’s $19.5 million estate purchase on Glade Road in 2014; it also ranks as the second-highest home sale in the entire Chicago metro area this year, trailing only a $10.1 million condo deal in the Gold Coast in March.

The sale also exceeded the next-most-expensive 2025 Glencoe sale by more than $2 million. In March, a Longwood Avenue property sold for $7.1 million.

The deal is a bright spot for Chicago’s luxury housing market, where pricing strength has persisted even as sales volume softens in some high-end suburbs.

— Judah Duke