Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home in Kankakee hits market for nearly $800,000

CHICAGO - A Frank Lloyd Wright home in Kankakee has hit the market with an almost $800,000 price tag.

The Warren Hickox House, which sits about an hour south of Chicago in the 680 block of South Harrison Avenue, was listed Thursday for $779,000 through @properties agent Victoria Krause Schutte.

"It’s a living, breathing piece of art," Schutte told the Sun-Times. "You walk into the home and you feel like you’re in a special place. … You just feel good there."

The privately owned cream and red home, built at the turn of the 20th century and last sold in 1976, was designed during a "turning point" for Wright as he started moving toward the Prairie style, Schutte said. The architect would often bring Chicago-area clients down to the home and seat them in the reading nook’s facing built-in benches to help them visualize the new direction his work was taking.

Tall ceilings give the home a "Victorian feel," but the octagonal dining room and library on the first floor and Japanese geometry-inspired roof differentiate it from others in the same category, Schutte said. The home’s kitchen was updated before the current owners moved in, and it is one of the only unoriginal parts of the home. The exterior wood trim and interior built-in cabinetry has been preserved.

She said the home’s buyer would likely be "unique," as the Wright homes tend to be. Schutte is also overseeing the sales of three other homes designed by the famed architect, who built his first home in Oak Park, in Michigan. Those listings have drawn interest from buyers as far away as Dubai.

The first showing was scheduled for Monday, though Schutte said she expects interest to pick up, especially locally.

"Everybody in the community knows about this house," Schutte said. "But no one has been in it for 50 years, so there’s sort of a mystique about the house."

The blueprints for the home have been preserved by the Library of Congress.

The Hickox home sits near Wright’s larger B. Harley Bradley House, which was also built in 1900 and placed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was made open to the public for tours in 2010 by the nonprofit Wright in Kankakee organization, according to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

It was fully restored in 2005, keeping nearly all of the 90 art glass windows intact, and in 2010, the mortgage was paid off with help from community donors.

Unlike the Bradley House, the Hickox House has remained privately owned since it was built and has served as a family home for the current owners since they purchased it nearly half a century ago.

Schutte said this and the largely original lead-lined windows and cavernous ceilings give the home character.

"When you walk into this house, you can feel the house has energy," Schutte said. "There’s a lot of love in that house."