“Home Alone” house in Winnetka hits market at $5.3M

The Winnetka house that served as the backdrop for Kevin McCallister’s antics in the 1990 holiday classic “Home Alone” is up for sale. 

Tim and Trisha Johnson have listed their 10-bedroom, 9,100-square-foot estate on Lincoln Avenue for $5.25 million, or about $576 per square foot, Crain’s reported. It’s the second time the house has been on the market since its Hollywood debut.

The Johnsons bought the property for just shy of $1.6 million in 2012 and embarked on an extensive renovation, more than doubling its size by adding 5,100 square feet. The renovations included an enlarged kitchen, a new family room, an attached three-car garage and a subterranean sports court, said Katie Moor, the Coldwell Banker Realty agent representing the sellers.

Despite modernization, the nostalgic charm of the “Home Alone” house remains intact. The owners maintained the essence of its cinematic history, preserving iconic features such as the front door and the living and dining rooms, which played significant roles in the film. 

The Winnetka estate joins another notable movie home that recently hit the market in the North Shore area. The Kenilworth house featured in another John Hughes movie, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” is also up for grabs, priced at just under $2.5 million.

“Home Alone” director Chris Columbus described the house, built in 1920, as simultaneously “warm and menacing,” a perfect setting for the film’s mix of comedy and suspense. 

The property’s previous owners, John and Cynthia Abendshien, who lived there during filming, sold it to the Johnsons over a decade ago. In a whimsical nod to the film’s legacy, the Abendshiens’ listing agent once humorously checked the doorknob for heat, referencing one of the film’s memorable scenes.

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Winnetka often yields some of the most eye-popping sales and listings in the Chicago area. The ritzy suburb was home to the metro’s two priciest residential sales of 2023 — a 12,000-square-foot mansion that traded for $12.5 million, and a 10,000-square-foot house that sold for $12.25 million. Those deals equated to $1,041 and $1,225 per square foot, respectively.

A 12,700-square-foot lakefront mansion on Sheridan Road just hit the market in Winnetka at nearly $11.8 million, $925 per square foot. If the house sells even remotely close to the asking price, it would become the most-expensive home sale in Chicagoland this year, topping a $9.3 million condo transaction in Chicago’s Gold Coast. 

—Quinn Donoghue