Couple’s castle sits, awaiting owners

BY MARY ELLEN PODMOLIK Comments 0
Published: October 31, 2009

Paul Iwanski is among the Chicago-area homebuilders looking for that special someone.

For the past nine years, his firm, commercial contractor Iwanski-Pyzik Masonry, has built area schools and drugstores. Last year, Iwanski, who keeps swords on his office wall, decided to follow one of his dreams.

He built a castle.

The 18,000-square-foot home in Oak Brook, Ill., still unfinished, includes more than 12,000 square feet of living space, walls 14 inches to 22 inches thick and heated concrete floors. Iwanski is selling it for $4 million unfinished; $5.75 million finished.

The home’s Web site, www.kingwanted.com, has received more than 14,000 hits, but has not produced any offers.

"I believe there is a buyer for it,” Iwanski said. "If we have to wait, that’s OK. We built this for us. If we cannot sell it, I won’t cry about it. Then I’ll find a way to live in it.”

Longtime homebuilder Don Ciaglia plowed ahead with the speculative construction of one of his largest luxury homes, on a wooded hilltop, despite the industry’s darkening skies a year ago.

Adds his wife, Ruth Ciaglia, an ERA Countrywood Realty agent who listed the home, "At the time, a house like this was really a good idea. There were houses like that that were selling. Who knew?”

Ciaglia has lowered the price by $50,000, to $5.39 million, but doesn’t plan any more reductions.

Price reductions on some luxury properties, however, are totaling more than the cost of several midpriced homes, giving these posh pads a new definition of "wow factor.”

A 7,800-square-foot cedar, concrete and stone home, originally priced at $6.7 million, had seen its price reduced to $4.995 million. Earlier this month, the private investors that funded its construction told the builder to slash the price by another $1 million.

"It tells you a lot, on a home that already has come down $1.7 million,” said Lisa Trace, a real estate agent with Griffith, Grant & Lackie Realtors in Lake Forest, Ill.

McClatchy-Tribune Information Services