Frank Lloyd Wright home in Glencoe comes cheap, but with projects

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This Frank Lloyd Wright Glencoe house is selling for $550,000. | Michelle LaVigne~Sun-Times Media

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Updated: August 12, 2011 4:27PM

Keith Hughes, a Cambridge, Mass., tourist trying to visit as many Frank Lloyd Wright houses as he can, squinted up at the corner of the roof of the one at 272 Sylvan Drive in Glencoe.

“There’s something growing on it,” he said. “Not a good sign.”

The little tree that won a foothold in the neglected gutter is not necessarily a big deal when one considers what is being offered here: a chance to buy into the Frank LLoyd Wright franchise for $550,000.

And that’s reduced from the $699,000 price when Lake Forest real estate salesman Jamie Roth listed it in May.

Still, no sale.

“I’m used to prices of three and a half million” for Wright-designed homes, said Carol Olsen, an Oak Park Realtor who’s expert in the work of arguably America’s most famous residential architect.

She had just finished showing the house to an Oak Park family that didn’t want to be quoted. But, literally, the lady of the house’s last word on emerging from the 1915 structure was “affordable.”

There’s a catch, however, beyond the slightly musty odor that accompanies opening the door, the peeling paint, the evidence of leakage in the basement.

This is not a modern house. What was comfortable in 1915 is less so today.

For instance, the passageways between the upstairs bedrooms are narrower than 21st-century normal.

“It’s not easy to meet in the hallways,” Roth grinned. “Families were supposed to get along.”

When standing in front of the vanity in the house’s only full bathroom, it’s advised not to fidget. Falling backward into the bathtub is a real possibility when it’s less than a foot behind your heel.

The three bedrooms, at 15, 10 and 12 feet by 11, are big for a house designed by Wright, who encouraged residents to promptly quit their bedrooms each morning for conviviality in the living room.

And there’s a small office, too. But the office or one of the bedrooms would likely have to go, or be squeezed, if a new owner wanted to make that bathroom bigger.

The only other bathroom in the house is a tiny powder room, though there is a lonely toilet set off all by itself, yards from a sink, in the basement.

And the nine-foot-wide kitchen might beg a little adjustment, too, as would the appliances that are clean, but haven’t been replaced in decades.

It’s the renovations that are driving down the price, Roth said.

It all shouldn’t be a big deal, he said. Normally, paying big money for such renovations should be easy to take: you get a Frank Lloyd Wright house in the famous Ravine Bluffs neighborhood of four other similar houses and several other interesting homes. You get to drive over Wright’s landmark Sylvan Road Bridge to get there. And you get almost a third of an acre of Glencoe land, though the house itself is only 1,712 square feet.

The closets are big. So are the planters and the balconies.

The problem, Roth said, is financing. Anybody who wants to get a mortgage on the house and fix it up would probably have to get a renovation loan, too, and those are harder to come by lately, he said.

“It’s a very cool house, and could be magnificent if somebody wants to give it what it needs,” he said.

“If I had the cash, I’d do it myself,” he said.

The house has Wright’s trademark horizontal design, and it’s nestled picturesquely on the land, ensconced in landscaping, another Wrightian quality.

Some of that landscaping has grown to hide the house even more than most homes built by the privacy-obsessed Wright.

Inside, there’s lots of light, from windows as well as Wright’s Japanese-inspired paper-shaded sconces.

Most Wright houses are built on slabs, but this one has a full basement.

But like some other Wright houses with cellars, it’s built with the architect’s independent choice of materials.

“That’s telephone tile,” Roth said, pointing to a basement wall’s big shiny blocks that look like subway tile on steroids.

“I’ve never seen it before. People come in and say, Oh, telephone tile.” He shrugged. “People who know, know.”

The hollow clay blocks were originally intended for parts of buildings where telephone cables needed to pass through, but in the Chicago area of the early 20th Century, they often wound up in foundations.

That apparently passed from style because with age, such foundations have been known, on occasion, to leak a bit.