Chicago’s highest-priced house — one that once was publicly shopped for $50 million — sold on Tuesday for $15.25 million to an undisclosed buyer.
As Elite Street first reported in July, the six-bedroom limestone mansion in Lincoln Park went under contract that month after more than seven years on the market. The sellers, United Automobile Insurance Co. Chairman Richard Parrillo and his wife, Michaela, first had sought $50 million for the mansion in 2016, and since November had been asking $23.5 million for it.
Public records show that the buyer of the mansion is an opaque land trust whose trustee is Chicago attorney Kathryn Kovitz Arnold. Arnold did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Jennifer Ames of Engel & Volkers Chicago, who represented the buyers, told Elite Street that the buyers are local and not from out of town. She declined to disclose the buyers’ identities.
However, Ames said, the buyers “saw the potential. Some areas of the house are unfinished. They are excited to make it their own.”
Although the mansion sold for a fraction of what the Parrillos originally had wanted, it still sets an all-time record for the highest-priced recorded sale of a single-family home within Chicago’s city limits. The previous holder of that distinction? Now-Gov. JB Pritzker, who paid $14.5 million in 2006 for his Astor Street mansion.
The city has had multiple condominium sales over the years for more than $15 million — the highest-priced of which was billionaire German Larrea’s $20.56 million purchase of the four-bedroom, 10,000-square-foot duplex condominium on the 71st floor of the Residences at the St. Regis Tower — but the Lincoln Park mansion now stands as the highest-priced single-family home inside Chicago to change hands. And even outside of Chicago’s city limits, only a select few suburban mansions have ever sold for more than $15.25 million.
Even so, by the reckoning of the Parrillos’ listing agent, the couple lost a tremendous amount of money on the deal. They paid $12.5 million to buy the site — fully eight city lots — from the Infant Welfare Society in 2005. And listing agent Tim Salm, who declined to comment on the sale, told Elite Street when the mansion first was listed in 2016 that the couple’s cost to build the mansion was $65 million, including land costs.
The Cook County assessor’s office, which came under fire recently in a joint investigation by the Tribune and the Illinois Answers Project, assessed the property at a fair market value of $16.2 million in 2023 — obviously far from the Parrillos’ estimated $65 million expense to create it, but relatively close to the $15.25 million sale price.
The mansion’s size is up for debate. Listing information calls the mansion 25,000 square feet, while Cook’s assessor assigns the mansion a size of 15,533 square feet. Regardless, the mansion has 11 bathrooms, an entryway with inlaid, precision-cut marble from the French Pyrenees, custom-designed bronze entry doors, Italian plaster ceiling work and reliefs, custom millwork, 18th-century light fixtures, a game room, a media room, a project room, a sitting room, two guest bedroom suites, a second-floor living room, a library, a music room, a kitchen with custom cabinetry and professional-grade appliances and a 2,000-square-foot wraparound terrace with an outdoor kitchen.
The mansion’s third level contains the primary bedroom suite, which has a hand-carved English marble fireplace and a custom dressing room, while the lower level has a 5,000-bottle wine cellar and tasting suite with 14-foot ceilings.
Outside on the property are a gated motor court, an arbor, a hand-forged pavilion, decorative fountains, a reflection pool. The mansion also has an attached, three-car garage.
The mansion’s asking price was reduced in 2020 from $50 million to $45 million and then early last year from $45 million to $30 million. In September, the asking price was reduced further to $27.9 million, and then, six weeks later, the price was dropped to $23.5 million.
The mansion had a $342,337 property tax bill in the 2023 tax year.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
