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A seven-bedroom, 13,894-square-foot vintage French Renaissance Revival-style mansion on 2.3 acres on Lake Michigan in Winnetka sold Wednesday for $31.3 million — the highest-priced home resale in Chicago-area history.
The sellers, retired investment banker Muneer Satter and his wife, Kristen Hertel, spent between $65 million and $72 million to create the estate, according to the listing agent, Jena Radnay of @properties Christie’s International Real Estate. The buyer is an opaque land trust whose beneficiary could not yet be determined, according to public records.
Satter and Hertel, who first listed the estate in August 2024 in an agents-only network for $35 million, paid $9.5 million in 2002 for the vintage 22-room mansion, which was built in 1928 and designed by architect Ernest Mayo. They spent another $4.1 million in 2013 to buy the property next door.
Ultimately, Satter and Hertel created a spread that contains 223 feet of private beachfront, a double-door boathouse, a commercial-level boardwalk, a Lannon stone custom fountain, manicured hedges, a heated motor court for 10 cars, an infinity pool and a pergola.
Radnay, who specializes in selling lakefront mansions, told Elite Street that the sale of the mansion, which is dubbed Windsor House after its first owners, represents “an amazing chapter of my career, as I never thought I would be so lucky to represent such an iconic lakefront North Shore property.”
“There is nothing like (this mansion), from the magnificent grounds and botanical gardens, infinity pool and spa, boathouse, boardwalk and private beach,” she said. “So many years of care and love went into this estate. It was a seamless transition to the next generational owner, who believed in the same, one-of-a-kind beauty.”
Satter and Hertel bought the mansion in 2002 from Keith Rudman, a bond trader and one of the partners who founded The Clubhouse restaurant chain. Rudman bought the mansion for $2.8 million in 1993 from manufacturing magnate Alex Stamatakis, who had bought it in 1980.
It was built in 1928 for Popular Mechanics magazine publisher Henry H. Windsor Jr. and his wife, former opera singer Louise Hunter Windsor, who were then newlyweds. The couple later divorced; Henry Windsor sold the magazine to the Hearst Corp. in 1958.
No single Chicago-area residential property has resold in an arm’s-length deal to another buyer for more than $25 million. In three cases, billionaires have paid amounts exceeding $22 million to assemble multiple properties, but in each of those cases, no one residential property changed hands for even $22 million, let alone for $31.3 million.
Starting in 2020, businessman Justin Ishbia paid $33.7 million for three adjoining lakefront homes in Winnetka that he demolished to make way for a mansion he is building with an estimated $44 million construction cost — meaning he would end up putting $77.7 million into his mansion.
Citadel hedge fund founder Ken Griffin paid $58.8 million in 2017 in four separate transactions — the largest of which was for $21.2 million — for the top four floors of the building at 9 W. Walton St. on the Near North Side.
Griffin, who never built out or combined those units and moved to Florida, sold the two highest floors in that building, comprising 15,000 square feet of raw space, in November to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker for $19 million. Griffin sold the remaining two floors in April to different buyers for $8.5 million and $7.4 million.
Lastly, filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, businesswoman Mellody Hobson, paid $11.2 million in 2023 to buy one of Griffin’s full-floor Park Tower penthouses and then began combining it with an existing full-floor penthouse one level below that they had bought in 2015 for $18.7 million. With an estimated $3.5 million in construction costs, Lucas and Hobson’s combined 16,000-square-foot duplex would have been created at a cost of $33.5 million.
Notably, none of those billionaires’ deals involved a resale for more than $22 million.
Satter and Hertel’s mansion had a $214,453 property tax bill in the 2023 tax year.
Windsor House is not the only high-priced lakefront mansion on the market to undergo a change in status this week. On Wednesday, a historic, six-bedroom Colonial Revival-style mansion on Lake Michigan in Kenilworth that was listed in July for $15 million found a buyer, and now has a contract pending for an undisclosed sale price. Radnay also is the listing agent for that renovated lakefront mansion.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
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