Lincoln Park condo in Grant Place co

Dennis Rodkin is a senior reporter covering residential real estate for Crain’s Chicago Business. He joined Crain’s in 2014 and has been covering real estate in Chicago since 1991.

A 70-foot expanse of glass that turns a corner and adds several feet more makes this Lincoln Park home “very light and bright,” says Gail Marks, who owns it with her husband, Andrew Marks.

A four-bedroom, roughly 4,500-square-footer on the third floor of a seven-unit co-op building on Grant Place, it’s coming on the market later in May. Listed with Joanne Nemerovski of Compass, it will be priced just under $4.3 million.

The couple bought the space new in 2007 and finished it to their specifications, which Gail Marks describes as “a family home with a warm modernity.” The developer’s use of glass and openness got the modernity rolling, and the Markses warmed it up with a sophisticated palette of tigerwood panels, lacquered cabinetry and Jerusalem limestone.

The location, half a block from the Francis Parker School and another block to the Lincoln Park Zoo, worked particularly well when they were raising two children. “Having our two daughters able to walk to school starting in third grade and having that park nearby was really something for the quality of our lives,” Gail Marks says. She’s been an at-home mom, and Andrew Marks is in finance. With the children grown, the couple is moving to Florida.

Because the building has just seven units, “it feels like home when we walk into the lobby,” Gail Marks says, “not like some ginormous tower.”

The 70-foot expanse of glass, seen one level below the top, includes a portion that is set back, creating a covered balcony that “becomes part of the living space” because of its integral spot in the floor plan, she says.

There’s a second, longer balcony, not seen in this photo but around the corner on the right side.

The longest glass wall faces south, which makes the interior bright in gloomy Chicago winters. Finishing the space after they bought it from developer Belgravia, “we leaned toward a warmer palette,” Gail Marks says, anchoring the transparency of the windows with heavier tigerwood panels both here in the living room and in the family room, seen in the photo at the top of this article. The floors are walnut and the fireplace wall is Jerusalem limestone, a material that shows up again elsewhere in the home.

An open layout puts the living and dining rooms together, but for visual separation the couple commissioned a set of sculptural panels to put between them.

To the right of those panels is something the two call their “bar cube,” inserted into the foyer to break the space up and create a bar that serves several rooms. It’s finished in automotive-grade lacquer, for a brilliant sheen.

This photo shows the bar, open to show its book-matched onyx wall behind floating glass shelves.

There’s a more casual place to dine, adjacent to the kitchen and the second balcony. This one, facing east, “is where we barbecue,” Gail Marks says. “It becomes part of the kitchen.”

The two balconies “give us outdoor space, as opposed to just living in a box,” she says. There’s also a rooftop deck and a ground-level outdoor half-court for basketball, shared by all residents of the building.

Jerusalem limestone appears again in the kitchen, as countertops. The cabinets here are lacquered, but not with automotive-grade, Gail Marks says.

“There’s a lot of storage and a double refrigerator-freezer because with our proximity to Parker,” she says, “we always have like a thousand kids at our house.”

The drapes, here and throughout the space, are motorized.

Tigerwood panels cover two walls of a room that doubles as Andrew Marks’s office and a TV room. On the office wall, they conceal storage.

Set as far back from the street as the floor plan allows, the primary bedroom has windows on two sides and is big enough, about 352 square feet, to include a sitting area.

The walls are covered in grasscloth.

In the primary bath, honey onyx walls flank a soaking tub. “The onyx makes it a very warm look,” Gail Marks says, and its color tones carry through into the floor and wall tiles.

The developer’s plans for the home included a spacious laundry room, but Gail Marks wasn’t having that. “My husband collects wine, and I thought it would be great to have a proper wine cellar,” she says.

There’s room for about 2,400 bottles. “Any oenophile would go bananas for this,” she says, and be unlikely to swoon about the laundry room, which is next door and about half this size.

Atop the four-story building is a common element for all seven units, a rooftop deck with a view over treetops to the downtown skyline. “We’re on this quiet street with the park and the lake and Parker,” Gail Marks says. “It’s easy living.”

Dennis Rodkin is a senior reporter covering residential real estate for Crain’s Chicago Business. He joined Crain’s in 2014 and has been covering real estate in Chicago since 1991.

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