Real Estate Envy: Ferris Bueller House for Sale

Well, not actually Ferris's house, but the house where his best friend, Cameron, lived in that cinematic opus, Ferris Bueller's Day Off. (C'mon -- you know you saw it, like, six times.)

The house -- all cold, sleek glass, steel, and hard edges -- was meant to symbolize poor, chronically depressed Cameron's lonely, loveless family life (as opposed to Ferris's own cluttered, cozy, love-filled traditional abode).

But looking at these photos of the 5,300-square-foot Highland Park, Illinois home -- which just went up for sale -- today, I don't find it cold at all. There's a lot more warm wood than I remember from the movie, and being nestled amidst the trees like that? Dreamy.

Anyway, the house is currently listed with Sotheby's International Realty at the bargain price of just $2.3 million.

So, who's gonna grab it? Bueller? ... Bueller? ... Anyone?

Real Estate Envy: I Want This House

Part of my constant fantasizing about Other Places to Live involves searching the real estate listings in whatever locale I happen to be obsessing over at any given time.

So, since we're headed back up to Portland soon, I found myself on PortlandModern to see what's on the market there now. I immediately zeroed in on this place.

I can't quite believe that I'm drooling over what's essentially a shameless Joseph Eichler ripoff. (I grew up in a city of Eichlers -- and when I was a kid, they were actually somewhat disdained for their cheap construction and midcentury aesthetic.) Plus, I'm a certified old house lover -- and by "old," I mean pre-WWII.

But just as I've done a 180 on modern design in the last few years -- I used to not want anything in my home that was made after the 1930s -- I'm coming around to modern architecture as well. Now I can definitely appreciate the airiness, openness, and simplicity of these post-war family homes.

Plus, by Bay Area standards, the price tag on this house -- $350,000 -- is cheap. If you live anywhere between San Francisco and New York, that price may be eye-popping for different reasons. But here, a similar house would easily go for at least twice as much, even during the current housing slump. (And yes, I do realize that this is why Portlanders hate California buyers, who come in and swoop up their housing stock, driving up prices.)

Anyway, I'd be on the phone with the realtor right now if this house was in Portland, but it's actually in Beaverton. Anyone out there reading who's familiar with Beaverton? Abject Suburbia, or close enough in to be worth a look?

P.S. For more Portland-area house porn, don't miss Melissa's awesome Drive-Bys series on the Inspired Room blog. For more Eichleresque house porn, check out my House Voyeur tour of a revamped Eichler in the Oakland hills. And for more nationwide house porn, see my Coast-to-Coast Modern post.

Real Estate Envy: Coast to Coast Modern

I picked up a copy of Atomic Ranch magazine recently, and thumbing through it I was struck by how many ads there were from boutique real estate brokerages specializing in midcentury modern homes.

Because I am a shameless lookie-loo when it comes to homes for sale (seriously, the realtors around here all know me by name at this point, since I've been showing up at their Sunday open houses for years now), I couldn't resist checking out some of the MCM real estate on offer around the country. I always wonder what it might be like to live somewhere else, and it's fascinating to me to see just how much -- or how little -- my money might buy in other places.

Let's take a quick tour, shall we?

San Diego: 3BR, 2BA, 1,859 square feet for $815,000, courtesy of San Diego Modern Homes

Palm Springs, California: 3BR, 2BA, 1,225 square feet for
$629,000, courtesy of Midcentury Properties

Corona Del Mar, California: 8BR, 10BA for $75,000,000 (you read that right: 75 million dollars), courtesy of SoCal Modern

Long Beach, California: 3BR, 1.5BA, 2,054 square feet for $849,000, courtesy of SoCal Modern

Los Angeles: 4BR, 3BA for $1,730,000, courtesy of Valley Modern

Ross, California: 7BR, 5BA, 5,000 square feet for $10,450,000, courtesy of Marin Modern

Portland, Oregon: 3BR, 2BA for $525,000, courtesy of Portland Modern

Phoenix: 3BR, 2BA, 1,890 square feet for $315,000, courtesy of Niche Find Yours

Denver: 3BR, 2BA, 3,129 square feet for $875,000, courtesy of Mile Hi Modern

Austin, Texas: 3BR, 2BA, 1,636 square feet for $250,000, courtesy of The Marye Company

Houston: 4BR, 3BA for $150,000, courtesy of Glenbrook Valley

Lake Forest, Illinois: 4BR, 4BA for $1,869,000, courtesy of JetSet Modern

Hamilton, Ohio: 4BR, 3BA for $260,000, courtesy of Cincinnati Modern

Sarasota, Florida: 2BR, 2.5BA, 2,302 square feet for $1,475,000, courtesy of Modern Sarasota

Is it just me, or is Texas suddenly looking really appealing?

Set-Design Drool: The Beach Studios

I love the viral nature of blogging -- how someone somewhere will spot something great, then write about it on his or her blog, and then lots of other people in lots of other places will see it and write about it on their blogs. And suddenly that great thing will be pinging all over the world, spreading like, well, a virus -- except that it fills you with delight and not, you know, phlegm.

The Beach Studios site is one of those great things. I spotted it on one of my daily reads, At Home at Home -- whose Los Angeles-dwelling blogger extraordinaire, Laure, had spied it on the New York-based Paris Apartment, who in turn had seen it on Hong Kong's Studio Annetta.

Anyway, Beach Studios is a London agency that rents out locations for photo and film shoots -- and that has *the* most breathtaking collection of properties I have ever seen. I want to move into all of them, immediately.

Take a look:

Stansfield Road

Foster House

New Cross

St. Georges Road

Haldane Road

Thames Street

Lavender Grove

The Factory

Tredeague

Canonbury

Brondesbury Villas

Sigh.

See more right here.

Cool (Evil) Tool: Property Shark

There's no denying it: Real estate is a national obsession.

Those who own a piece of the pie either sit smugly on their equity or lay awake at night convinced that the bottom is about to fall out. Those who've been locked out by spiraling prices alternate between despair over the seeming impossibility of owning their own home and "I-told-you-so" glee as prices in some areas start to slip.

How much the neighbors are asking for their home -- and how much they actually get for it -- is discussed openly (quel horreur!) at dinner parties and soccer matches, while the home-sales log in the Sunday paper is grabbed and consumed before the coffee has even finished percolating.

For those of us who like to indulge our real estate OCD online, too, there are a bevy of sites that dish up the dirt on home prices. The snark-meisters at Curbed offer biting commentary on the real estate markets in New York, L.A., and San Francisco. Zillow -- and its questionable "Zestimates" of home values -- made big waves when it launched a couple of years ago. And now comes Property Shark.

From California to Massachusetts, nosy neighbors can punch in just about any address to get a complete dossier on a home (up to six reports a day are free; after that, you have to pay). The info includes the last sale price (and the sale price before that), the name of the owner, the amount of their mortgage, estimated current value, the relative quality of the home's construction, building permits on file, code violations, and maybe even a snapshot or two -- plus stats on recent "comparable" sales and neighborhood demographics.

All of these things are a matter of public record, of course -- but it would take a pathological level of inquisitiveness to actually go downtown to look them up. Thanks to Property Shark, the dope on your coworkers', friends', and neighbors' homes is available with a click of the mouse. It's enough to make even veteran snoopers feel downright dirty.

Now, um, what did you say your address was again?