The property is located within Parkwyn Village, a Wright-designed neighborhood that was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2022. In 1946, a group of young families wrote to Wright, asking if he would consider designing a housing community for them. “We have just purchased a 47-acre site,” they explained, expressing hope to offer homes for 40 to 60 families priced between $5,000 and $20,000. The architect agreed to lay out roads and house sites and drafted a plan that included 40 roughly-one-acre lots in addition to gardens, tennis courts, and playgrounds on the remaining seven acres. The visionary also designed four of the homes in the community, though many in the neighborhood today are inspired by Wright’s ideas and style.
The McCartney House, one of the four original homes, was built for Ward McCartney, a dentist, and his wife, Helen, who bought their lot in the early days of Parkwyn Village. “Your house is an experimental geometric form: a triangle, or several of them, almost a star. I hope you will enjoy living in it,” Helen, who wrote a short book about building and living in the home, remembers Wright saying when the couple visited Taliesin to collect the blueprints. The property was designed based on a four-foot parallelogram grid, with each wing shaped like a triangle and made from concrete blocks. The site spans 1,671 square feet and includes four bedrooms and two bathrooms.
One of Wright’s First Prairie-Style Homes
A few weeks later, one of Wright’s first Prairie-style homes hit the market in Kankakee, Illinois. Known as the Warren Hickox House, the home sits next to another Wright design, the Bradley House, which a brother and sister—and their respective spouses—commissioned at the turn of the century. The Bradley House, the larger of the two, was built for B. Harley Bradley and his wife, Anna Hickox Bradley, while the Warren Hickox House was designed for Anna’s brother, Warren, and his wife, Laura. The Bradley House is perhaps the more famous of the pair—and often credited as Wright’s first Prairie home—though the Warren Hickox property shares many similar qualities and is just as monumental.
The Northern Illinois home was one of a few realized iterations of Wright’s American System-Built Homes, a line of precut houses the architect designed throughout the 1910s. According to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Wright created over 960 drawings for the project and crafted more than 30 variations of the houses, and he was extremely passionate about offering Americans affordable, well-designed homes. Small units went for $2,750 up to $3,500, while larger ones cost between $5,000 and $100,000. The architect worked with Arthur L. Richards, a Milwaukee manufacturer, whose factory would cut and ship construction materials for builders to assemble. However, World War I saw necessary materials diverted abroad, which effectively stopped the business. The prefab homes were only available for about a year, and only 10 exist, according to the foundation.
The one now up for sale, known as the Lewis E. Burleigh House, was produced from the Model C3 design. The original blueprints show a single-story home with a central front porch, a living room, and kitchen at the front of the house, and two bedrooms and a bathroom at the back. There is also a basement. Since buying the property, Eckroth has remodeled some, adding a full bathroom to the primary as well as updating the kitchen. According to Crain’s, the home was also enlarged at some point, but there aren’t exact records noting when it happened or who was the architect.
“This is such a unique offering. Not only is this a Frank Lloyd Wright design, it has been so well maintained,” Fleetwood tells AD. “Every owner has invested in preserving and updating.” She and Eckroth won’t be responding to offers until noon on Sunday, at which point they will call the highest and best bidders. The home is four blocks from Lake Michigan and is priced slightly higher than the average home in the area, which is valued at $764,004, according to Zillow.
The pièce de résistance of the compound, which is currently up for grabs, is a 9-acre estate with three homes and a private yacht basin. If it sells for its asking price, $295 million, it will set a new real estate record in the United States as the most expensive home ever sold in the country. Financier Ken Griffin’s purchase of $240 million penthouse on Billionaire’s Row in Manhattan currently holds the title.
The Donahue home is one of a handful of nine-figure listing that have hit the market over the past few years, each positioned to surpass Griffin’s record. A penthouse in Central Park Tower was listed for $250 million in 2022, but is now asking $195 million. Similarly, financier Gary Winnick and his wife, Karen Winnick, listed their home in Los Angeles, known as Casa Encantada, in June 2023 for $250 million, but have since cut that down to $195 million as well.
The listing agents for the Donahue house, Coldwell Banker Realty’s Dawn McKenna Group, The Leighton Candler Team of Corcoran, and Savills’ Rory McMullen, told WSJ that the price of the Naples compound was justified not only because of the size, location, and yacht basin, but also because it would be difficult to construct such a property again. According to Redfin, the average home price in Naples is $800,000, while, on average, homes sell for $9.1 million in Port Royal, the neighborhood where the Donahue home is located.
The most expensive home for sale in the US offers 930 feet of frontage on Gordon Pass and Naples Bay and another 730 feet on the Gulf side. Bill Donahue, the son of John and Rhodora, spoke with WSJ about the sale of the family estate saying, “We’ve all enjoyed it, but it’s more or less time to move on.”