Ferris Bueller House Still for Sale?

By Colleen Kane, CNBC.com



Architecturally significant home featured in 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' is for sale

Photo: Paramount Pictures



The 57-year-old midcentury modern home at 370 Beech Street in Highland Park, Illinois is instantly recognizable to many 1980s survivors and fans of John Hughes movies as Cameron's house from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." By now, it's also known from popping up in the media, as it's been on the market for over a year.

But this 4-bedroom, 4-bath home has been notable since long before the '80s. Designed in 1953 by A. James Speyer and David Haid, the house is now heralded as "architecturally significant." With this significance, and the added cultural cachet of being featured in the movie, comes a price tag: the house is currently listed at a reduced price of $1,650,000. So how's that market for designer midcentury homes looking lately?

"We have a very bad market in this price range," says the property's realtor, Meladee Hughes (no relation to writer/director John Hughes). "This is a midcentury modern home that is not always what all the young people want-it doesn't have the bathrooms and kitchens with stainless steel-well, it does have some of the original stainless-but the young people want stone, they want this and that [updated features]."

"Some of the buyers that we've had have all wanted to preserve it, but other people walk in and they say, ‘Oh my God, I have to put in a new kitchen, a new bath...' "



Exterior of the famous Highland Park home for sale
Photo: Realtor.com

Hughes notes that the house is spacious at approximately 4,000 square feet, but there's also the matter of how the space is used, which doesn't work for all buyers. A lot of that space is taken up by the main room, so when a family comes in with 2 or 3 children, by today's standards it doesn't work. She explains that currently the bedrooms are configured as two at 20 x 20 feet each. The house originally had 5 bedrooms plus a den, and all the steel constructed walls are removable, so when the children of the original occupants left, they converted the four bedrooms into two larger bedrooms.
There was a buyer ready to go, laments Hughes, but they were thwarted when a storm caused damage to the roof and water damage inside last August. "We're fighting with the insurance company ever since-which is standard-and they are being very difficult to deal with. Because of that, the offer from the buyer was put on hold."

The plus side of all this, notes Hughes, is that the eventual buyer will get a brand new roof, and the home's exterior has already been restored. Because of the fallen tree limbs in that storm, the buyers will have new flooring, and two totally restored travertine marble baths.

Kitchen of famous home for sale

According to Hughes, who has been a realtor for 45 years and specializes in architecturally significant properties, things are looking up.

"We hope to have this sold in the next 30 to 60 days. Someone is going to be the lucky owner! I wish it would be me, I love this house, it's a magical house, just sitting there, looking outside, the deer come by, it's enchanted."