Buyer of Coffee Baron’s Chicago Gold Coast Home Revealed

The founder of the high-end travel company Gohagan & Company, was the buyer who paid $6.75 million for a restored 19th-century mansion in Chicago’s Gold Coast, the highest price paid for a single-family home in the neighborhood in almost three years.

Thomas Gohagan and his wife, Virginia, closed on the six-bedroom, 9,680-square-foot property at 1515 North State Parkway in April, Crain’s reported, citing public records. The price comes out to $697 per square foot.

The sellers, Dawn and David Solomon, listed the home in 2020 for $9.35 million. By the time it went under contract in February, the ask had dropped to just under $7 million, meaning the Gohagans paid roughly 72 percent of the initial asking price.

Tim Salm of Jameson Sotheby’s International Realty represented the sellers, and Thomas Morrisey of Cedar Realty Group repped the buyers.

It was the highest-priced Gold Coast single-family home sale since July 2022, when a Burton Place mansion sold for $7 million. That property, a limestone mansion with 19th-century roots and extensive renovations.

The home in the April transaction was built in 1898 and commissioned by coffee baron William McLaughlin as a wedding gift for his daughter, Florence. Its architect, Frederick W. Perkins, was known for designing grand estates across the Midwest and East Coast.

The home blends Old World detailing with modern finishes: a foyer with a carved-wood ceiling, plastered ornamental ceilings, a formal dining room with a coffee bean motif carved into its paneling and a florid wrought-iron staircase.

The Solomons, who bought the mansion in 2008 for $3.8 million after a foreclosure, spent years restoring it. In a 2020 interview, Dawn Solomon described it as a once-in-a-lifetime project: “Our chance to rebuild one of these Gold Coast homes sensitively and live in it for the rest of our lives.”

But the couple relocated after David Solomon, then CEO of Lazard’s middle-market advisory, accepted a new role in Florida.

Thomas Gohagan’s firm, founded in 1984, specializes in curated domestic and international tours for alumni associations and cultural institutions. The firm was acquired by travel-focused private equity firm Certares a few years ago and now operates offices in the Rookery Building and on Bryn Mawr Avenue.

The deal adds to a streak of high-profile Gold Coast listings and sales this spring. In April, tech billionaire Michael Krasny sold a Park Tower condo at a 46 percent discount for $2.35 million. In March, the founder of Pete’s Fresh Market relisted a historic Dearborn Street mansion for $18.5 million. That same month, a penthouse at 4 East Elm closed for $10.1 million, the priciest home sale in Chicago so far this year.

— Judah Duke