A five-bedroom, 16,000-square-foot Georgian-style mansion on Lake Michigan in Winnetka sold last week for $34.5 million including personal property — a Chicago-area sales record for the sale of any single residential property in history.

Built in 2016 and with 151 feet of beachfront on a 1.9-acre property, the mansion has a publicly assessed 11,026 square feet, according to the Cook County Assessor, although its total finished square footage is 16,000 square feet. The mansion was designed by architect Bill Fork of Northworks Architecture and is just one of 12 lots in Winnetka that extends from Sheridan Road to the lakeshore.

Features include plaster walls, Belgian oak planked floors, an enfilade, an oak-paneled music room, a white-walled living room, custom windows by Loewen and Hopes, a 3/4-inch cedar shake roof and a kitchen with bronze island legs, walnut floors and a countertop and backsplash topped by two slabs of Paonazzo marble. Outside on the property are a pool and spa, a green house, a boat house and a cabana house. The mansion was featured in Architectural Digest magazine in 2019, which quoted interior designer Kara Mann calling it a “special house with a really unique feel that’s not at all trendy or of-the-moment.”

The mansion’s sellers, Jeffrey Quicksilver, who cofounded real estate investment firm Walton Street Capital, and his wife, Ashley, who owns the high-end Winnetka women’s boutique Athene, bought the property in 2013 for $8 million from Carry Buck, the ex-wife of Chicago developer John Buck. The Quicksilvers then knocked down the Bucks’ longtime 13-room mansion and built the mansion that they just sold. The buyer of the mansion last week is an opaque land trust whose beneficiary could not yet be determined, according to public records.

The Quicksilvers had listed the lakefront mansion entirely off-market, for $35 million.

By all measures, the Quicksilvers’ sale of the mansion sets a new record for the arm’s-length sale of an individual single-family home in the Chicago area, eclipsing the $31.25 million sale in August of retired investment banker Muneer Satter’s lakefront mansion in Winnetka. Other package deals of homes have sold for more, but those were multi-parcel assemblages, including billionaire Ken Griffin paying $58.75 million in 2017 for four floors in a luxury building on the North Side — which he never built out or occupied — and billionaire Justin Ishbia paying $33.7 million for three adjoining lakefront homes in Winnetka, all of which he demolished to build a mansion whose construction cost is $44 million.

The Quicksilvers’ sale price was $34.5 million including personal property, such as furniture. The recorded sale price, according to a public record, was $32.5 million, suggesting that the furniture had an additional $2 million in value.

Jena Radnay of @properties Christie’s International Real Estate represented both the sellers and the buyers. She declined to comment on the buyer’s identity, but told Elite Street that “like I’ve always said, there’s a lot of off-market activity that always happens with exclusive lakefront properties, making Winnetka the No. 1 luxury lakefront market.”

The mansion had a $231,097 property tax bill in the 2024 tax year. The mansion has been assessed by Cook County with a value of $14.66 million — an assessed value that now is sure to rise.

Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.

 

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/11/24/winnetka-lake-michigan-mansion-record-sale/