A partner and top client services and business development executive at Chicago investment firm LSV Asset Management is the buyer who paid $21.85 million in August for a 10-bedroom, 20,000-square-foot waterfront estate on Geneva Lake in Lake Geneva, Wis.
James W. Owens Jr., who also owns a home in Elmhurst, bought the historic estate on 12.78 acres in Lake Geneva, according to real estate sources in Lake Geneva. On Sunday, Owens declined to comment on the purchase, which he made through an opaque Wisconsin limited liability company.
Owens’ purchase is the second highest-priced sale on record in the Lake Geneva area, eclipsed only by the record $36 million amount that billionaire J. Christopher Reyes and his wife, Anna, paid in January 2022 for the late philanthropist and investment manager Richard Driehaus’ longtime lakefront mansion.
Owens bought the waterfront property in August from the estate of the late Harold Byron Smith Jr., a longtime business executive who died in 2022 at age 89. Smith, who had bought the property in 1998, had been a longtime leader at Glenview-based Illinois Tool Works, which his great-grandfather, Byron L. Smith, founded. During his long career at Illinois Tool Works, Harold Byron Smith Jr. served as president, chief operating officer and vice chairman. Smith also served for 36 years on the board of the Northern Trust Company, which his great-grandfather also had founded.
The lakefront property that Owens bought consists of a Southern Colonial-style main house with a veranda, a three-bedroom guest house, an apartment over its original garage, a pool and a 1,800-square-foot building that previously had contained an extensive model railroad. The land also comes with 368 feet of lake frontage.
The main house dates to 1900 and was designed by architect Howard Van Doren Shaw and built for Tracy Drake, who with his brother, John Drake, built the Drake and Blackstone hotels in Chicago. Later owners of the property included the families of parking lot operator Richard Grant Lydy, Scott Foresman & Co. executive Robert C. McNamara Jr. and Jim Long, who was the former proprietor of the now-defunct Elmhurst auto dealership Long Chevrolet.
Smith renovated the lakefront mansion with a new foundation and basement and expanded with two wings and a basement theater. After his death, the property was listed in May 2023 for $35 million and its asking price was reduced in September 2023 to $30 million. Smith’s estate later cut its asking price further to $28 million.
The $21.85 million purchase isn’t the only recent Lake Geneva-area residential deal of which Owens has been a part. In October, Owens sold another waterfront house on Lake Geneva, a five-bedroom, 4,293-square-foot home on the lake’s east end, for $5.9 million to former Republican congressional candidate Vincent Kolber and his wife, Patricia. Vincent Kolber is the founder of Chicago-based RESIDCO, which leases and sells aviation equipment and railcars.
Built in 1925 and renovated in 2013, the house the the Kolbers bought from Owens has a gated cobblestone driveway, five bathrooms, a private primary suite with a fireplace and a lakeside balcony and a detached garage.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.