LOCATION: Highland Park, IL
PRICE: $29,000,000
SIZE: 32,683 square feet, 9 bedrooms, 15 full and 4 half bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Simmer down tater tots. We know we're a bit late to this particular rodeo. That's because, for better and/or worse, Your Mama spent this morning frying up a very different celebrity real estate fish.
While Your Mama got busy shucking, jiving and making petty jabs about Little Kimmy Kardashian and her recent (and alleged) real estate activities, the celebrity real estate pooper scoopers over at The Wall Street Journal revealed that long-ago-retired but still much-beloved professional basketballer and sports world entrepreneur Michal Jordon pushed his multi-wing mega-mansion in the upscale Chicago suburb of Highland Park (IL) on the market with a super-sized and publicity-ensuring $29,000,000 asking price.
Even Your Mama, who does not know a tight end from a power forward in the athletic sense, knows well that Mister Michael Jordan is one of America's most adored, accomplished, and highly paid professional athletes and product endorsers with a half billion dollar-plus fortune and fat property portfolio to prove it.
Mister Jordan was expensively divorced from his first wife Juanita in 2007; It reportedly cost him close to $170,000,000 or, seen another way, ten million clams for every 17 years they were married. At about the time of their legal severance of marital ties the family's long-time Highland Park estate was transferred in to a trust. Unfortunately, Your Mama has no specific intel about whether Mister Jordan (along with his new fiancée Yvett Prieto) or ex-Missus Jordon occupied and maintained the premises over the last five years. Whatever the case, the suburban estate with its mall-sized mansion is now up for grabs.
The electronically-controlled front gates bear the number 23, which Your Mama thought might be the property's street address until we did a little due diligence and discovered '23' was the number that appeared on Mister Jordan's jersey throughout his illustrious career on the hardwoods. The gates swing open to a tree-lined black top drive that swoops across the thoroughly landscaped 7.29 acre estate and around to a massive, tree-shaded circular drive that has far more in common with the motor court out front of some random resort hotel than it does the driveway of average American home. The snaking drive continues beyond the circular drive, past two separate (but attached), climate-controlled, three car garages, curves around to a pair of small parking lots and winds up at a rear motor court where there appears to be another three-bay, climate-controlled garage.
Listing information shows Mister Jordan's mega-mansion measures in at a titanic 32,683 square feet with a total of 9 bedrooms and 15 full and 4 half bathrooms. It doesn't take a bejeweled abacus to figure out that's a total of 19 terlits, an amount that ensures the owner/resident of this beast of a house employ a full-time minimum wager tasked only to locate and lave all 19 bathrooms on a twice weekly basis. The Wall Street Journal pegged the manse at "more than 56,000 square feet of space," an figure we think—but can not confirm—probably includes the colossal compound's "indoor basketball complex" and "three bedroom guesthouse."
The Wall Street Journal also reported the mansion was constructed between 1993 and 1995 and images show it retains its original, well maintained and liberally curvaceous 1980s-minded exterior articulation. The interior was extensively renovated in 2009 with a decidedly sleek and very contemporary aspect that skews vaguely corporate due in part to the large scale of some of the rooms. Interior spaces, according to listing information, marketing materials and/or previous reports, include hotel ballroom-proportioned 1,056 square living room and an almost 800 square foot family room with floor-to-ceiling glass sliders on two opposite walls and a massive triangular sky light that runs like a spine down the center of the 37-foot long room.
A circular dining area's soaring ceiling is topped by an octagonal sky light and the adjacent, sculptural kitchen has a huge center island (with cook top) that appears to float in the center of the room, full-height pantry and storage cabinets, and—one imagines—the most expensive appliances money can buy. We realize this kitchen will not appeal to those who see kitchens as the emotional heart of the home but for all those folks who prefer their cooking centers be more Maserati than mini-van, this one will surely make them pee their pants with culinary equipment desire.
Listing information indicates Mister Jordan's mansion also contains a 500-plus square foot second level library, a 600-plus square foot den on the main level, an office and a study also on the main level, and at least one laundry room the size of what would pass for a good-sized bedroom in a modest suburban ranch house.
The various and vast patios and terraces that extend off the back of the house drop down to high-maintenance manicured grounds that encompass acres of flat lawns with an amoebic putting green, tucked away tennis court, suggestively-shaped deep-water pond, and a children's playground with two elaborate jungle gyms. Both The WSJ and listing information we peeped indicate Mister Jordan's estate includes a swimming pool although we're unable to locate it listing photos and/or aerial images of the property.
The property's pièce de résistance—and also perhaps it's bête noire due to the obvious fact that so few people in the Chicago area who can afford it will actually want to own or maintain it—would most certainly be the fully custom, state-of-the-art indoor basketball complex completed in 2001 and equipped with, as per The WSJ, "a full-size regulation basketball court with specially cushioned hardwood flooring, adjustable backstops and baskets and competition-quality, high-intensity lighting. The complex has a sound system tuned to provide perfect acoustics within the court space."
As best as we know from our research, in addition to the Highland Park beast Mister Jordan heaved on to the market this week His Airness currently maintains a penthouse pad in Charlotte, NC (where he's part owner of some professional basketball team or another that we know nothing about), a major mansion in the a gated, golf community in Jupiter, FL that is either newly completed ought to soon be completed, and a substantial ski house on almost 4 acres in posh Park City, UT.
aerial photo (top): Bing
listing photos: Baird & Warner
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