“The man who prevented the demolition of a historically significant bungalow in Beverly and spent a decade restoring it has it on the market.
“‘Nobody was living there but a possum when I bought it,’ David Kroll says of the 1909 bungalow on the Southwest Side.
“One of seven Prairie-style homes on one street designed by Walter Burley Griffin before he moved to Australia in 1914 to design that nation’s capital city, the house was boarded up and foreclosed by a lender before Kroll bought it in 2005 for $275,000.
“At the time, Kroll says, the house had been vacant for something like five years, and ‘the next step for it was going to be demolition.’
“Kroll is now asking $489,900 for the five-bedroom, roughly 2,200-square-foot bungalow on 104th Place, which is also called Walter Burley Griffin Place.
“Over the course of a decade, Kroll restored the plaster interior walls and the stucco exterior, replaced the wood floors and rebuilt the cantilevered canopy on the front, doing much of the work himself. In some places, he did a modern take on Griffin’s original, such as the stacked-stone fireplace mantel in the living room. Kroll also added two full baths and one partial bath, supplementing the original single bath.
“‘It was a labor of love,’ Kroll says. ‘I grew up around the corner and always liked these houses.” This one, known as the Edmund C. Garrity House, is the second in the group that Kroll restored. (Rodkin, Crain’s Chicago Business, 5/20/22)