Compass agent Pamela Linn wasn’t sure how to price the suburban Chicago-area home when the sellers approached her in 2023.
The Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Hills-DeCaro House in Oak Park, just west of the city, is situated among a cluster of the famous architect’s homes on Forest Avenue. Though it had been well maintained by the previous owners over 25 years, there were few recent comps for historic properties like it — the nearby Wright homes don’t sell often, and most do not have lots as expansive as the Hills-DeCaro House’s 0.34-acre yard.
But in the years between that first conversation with the sellers and the home being listed last year, the market, especially for historic homes, “exploded,” Compass agent Eudice Fogel, who represented the clients alongside Linn and Compass agent Jayme Slate, said. In 2024, the Wright-designed Winslow House in River Forest sold for $2.2 million, helping solve the comp problem.
After the sellers teased the upcoming listing in Crain’s in August, the future buyers toured and made an offer within 48 hours, before the home was even listed privately. The home was already under contract by the time it entered the Multiple Listing Service’s private network, and the deal closed March 31 for $2.3 million, $5,000 above its asking price.
“If we would have gone on the market three years ago, we wouldn’t have gotten this price,” Fogel said. “I was thinking we’d be lucky if we got $1.5 or $1.6 [million].”
“Right now is a good time to sell if you have a house that’s over 100, 120, maybe more, years old,” Linn said.
Not everywhere. A few miles away, in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, another Wright-designed home is falling apart with no clear path to preservation. The J.J. Walser Jr. House is vacant and uninhabited, with a hole in its roof and rotting floorboards.
Over the past few decades, the Austin home deteriorated after the previous owner, an aging widow, could not keep up with the exorbitant costs of maintenance. She died in 2019, leaving the property vacant. Lenders took over the house through foreclosure, and Fannie Mae now owns the crumbling structure. Appraisers value the property at just $65,000, and experts estimate that restoration will require at least $2 million.
In the niche market of Frank Lloyd Wright homes, this disparity is common. The high cost of preservation — often mandated by historic preservation departments — means that well-maintained homes command a premium while homes saddled with decades of deferred maintenance will sometimes require double the purchase price or more to restore.
“There are people who want an old house and they want it relatively turnkey, and that’s what they will look for,” John Waters, the Preservation Programs Director at the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, said. “And there are others who will take on a project.”
Wright’s Prairie School and later Usonian architecture transformed 20th-century American architecture, swapping revivalist designs for horizontal lines, open floor plans and integration with nature.
Wright set up his home and studio in Oak Park in 1889, using the surrounding neighborhoods and wider Chicagoland as a testing ground for his experiments. Today, the metro area boasts the largest concentration of Wright homes anywhere in the country, attracting visitors who tour, and sometimes purchase, the historic homes.
“You have to be a fan to buy a [Wright] house. Like a serious fan,” said Lukas Ruecker, a health care consulting executive in Ohio who owns a Wright home and is renovating a second one in Hinsdale. “Because they all know how hard it is to work with these houses.”
Cost of maintenance
For serious fans willing to shell out $2 million or more for a Wright home, the costs don’t stop at closing. Speaking to the New York Times in 1953, Wright said, “The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines.” The vine planting has become an intensive, expensive endeavor.
Wright’s homes are notorious for their structural quirks that make standard repairs difficult: Leaky roofs, unorthodox construction methods and sparse heating and cooling systems make for complicated renovations. Wright was experimenting with new methods and new materials, and they didn’t always stand the test of time.
Ruecker knows this firsthand. He is on his second Wright home renovation, undertaking a project to restore the Bagley House in Hinsdale. Ruecker lives in the Wright-designed Tonkens House in Amberley, Ohio, which he restored after purchasing it in 2015 for $900,000.
That home was built using Wright’s “Usonian Automatic” system, which was an experimental building method Ruecker described as a “Lego building kit” involving interlocking concrete blocks reinforced by rods that can be arranged in different ways and maintain structural stability.
“You have to be a fan to buy a [Wright] house. Like a serious fan.”
When it came time to fix the roof, Ruecker couldn’t find anyone to take on the job. He said six different structural engineering firms refused to do the repair, telling him the formulas to ensure structural integrity simply didn’t exist in their engineering handbooks.
The fix ended up taking seven years and required sourcing unique concrete mixes and construction methods from Malaysia, with specialty crews flying in, he said.
“That is a construction method challenge,” Ruecker said. “It’s not put together in any way that anybody today recognizes or uses.”
Ruecker and his wife, Safina Uberoi, who sits on the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy Board, purchased the Hinsdale home in 2021 in a bid to save it from being torn down, Ruecker said. Ruecker is working on restoring the home, removing additions that went up over the decades and returning to original materials for the exterior.
After paying $1.3 million for the home, Ruecker is budgeting “millions” more for the project. He said the couple is likely to sell the house once it’s done, but he doesn’t expect to recoup the outlay. To Ruecker and other Wright fans, the investment is akin to buying a beautiful painting or a luxury yacht.
“It’s a work of love. I think that’s the best way of saying it,” he said.
John Eifler, an architect whose firm, Eifler Associates, has restored more than two dozen Wright homes, owns the Wright-designed Ross House in Glencoe. He took a different approach when restoring the home in 2011. Rather than aiming for complete historic replication, he tried to keep the carrying costs down, maximize energy efficiency and work with sustainable materials.
Rather than replacing the original cedar shingles on the home, Eifler opted for using recycled aluminum treated to look like wood. The material lasts longer than wood and can be recycled, he said. The heating and cooling system was replaced with geothermal energy and he installed solar panels on the roof. New panes went on the existing glass windows, improving the insulation.
Eifler said he had to fight the state’s historic preservation officials for approval for some of the changes. He described state regulators as having a “vigilantism” that makes pursuing flexible restorations difficult.
“If you’re living in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, why would you live with a 1915 kitchen and 1915 mechanical systems and single-pane glass everywhere, and your heating bills through the roof?” he said. “Ultimately, restoration or rehabilitation should be done so that the owners are comfortable and they enjoy living in their house.”
State regulators are required to follow the National Park Service’s rehabilitation standards for any project getting public tax incentives, but local interpretations of those rules can differ. A spokesperson for the Illinois State Historic Preservation Office said the guidelines are “inherently flexible” and that the state will approve cost-effective energy upgrades if they don’t sacrifice a home’s historic character. The spokesperson said the agency will work with homeowners who wish to apply, but noted not all scopes of work can meet the standards.
Teardown threats
Because of the relative inaccessibility of buying and maintaining Wright homes, they’re often targeted for teardowns in the high-cost areas around Chicago. Even with the draw for wealthy enthusiasts, the land value in places like Hinsdale or Glencoe often outpaces the subjective value to preservationists.
Bonnie McDonald, CEO of Landmarks Illinois, noted that if a property isn’t prized as a pristine work of art by a niche preservationist, developers and standard luxury buyers will treat it the same as any other piece of real estate.
“It may not have the same level of value to one person because Frank Lloyd Wright isn’t as important to them,” she said. One owner’s masterpiece is another owner’s eyesore. “They may be looking at the land, for example.”
Sometimes, both sides win, as at the Booth Cottage in Glencoe. The home went up for sale in 2019 on a valuable lot in the Ravine Bluff neighborhood, and it quickly became clear that it would likely be torn down by a developer.
Preservationists worked with the developer and the village to relocate the whole cottage onto a public park, and it’s now owned by the Glencoe Historical Society. Meanwhile, a new home on the lot sold in 2022 for $2.6 million.
Back in Austin, the fate of the Walser House is still in limbo. It has landmark status, giving it protection from the wrecking ball. Austin Coming Together, a group of nonprofits in the neighborhood, is interested in buying the home; Landmarks Illinois and the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy are is trying to make it happen, McDonald said.
McDonald said Landmarks Illinois would work with the group to find pro bono architecture and labor, provide low-interest loans and connect with donors for grant opportunities to make the finances work. The renovated home could become a community center.
The idea is “to think about the big picture of our communities and how historic places fit into bigger societal needs,” McDonald said. “How they can serve people in better ways.”