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Credit: @properties Christie’s International Real Estate
During the pandemic, a Chicago-based architect designed a serene, contemporary home with a pool in Southwest Michigan for his family, but then his career shifted to Saudi Arabia. Now, he’s put the property on the market.
Marc Cerone is asking a little more than $4.18 million for the home, a six-bedroom on Pier Street in Lakeside in Michigan’s far southwest corner. The house, on six-tenths of an acre about two blocks from the beach, is represented by Jan Smith of @properties Christie’s International Real Estate. It went on the market June 24.
“The great room is the hallmark of the home,” Cerone told Crain’s in an email. That space, seen in the image at the top of this story, features “a series of large high clearstory windows which flood the room with light and an ever-changing view of the surrounding tree canopies and skies.” The tall black brick fireplace wall echoes the exteriors’ black brick and other black-toned materials that give it a quiet, almost neutral look set into the trees on the site.
Cerone was the interior architecture director at the noted Chicago firm Adrian Smith & Gordon Gill Architecture, having worked on the expansion of Steppenwolf Theatre’s Halsted Street campus, the Chicago Architecture Center on Wacker Drive and a super tall tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, that is now slated to be the world’s tallest building when complete, among other projects.
Credit: @properties Christie’s International Real Estate
In 2022, Cerone became the head of interior architecture at Red Sea Global, a developer of hotels and residential and tourism infrastructure in Riyadh. His projects include interiors at properties on Shura Island and Laheq Island.
The Lakeside house was completed the same year as Cerone took the job in Saudi Arabia. He designed it as a full-time home for himself and his partner, Nicholas Trakas, after the former full-time Chicagoans had lived in New Buffalo, Mich., for a few years.
They built it on land they purchased from another Chicago architect, Margaret McCurry, who with her late husband, architect Stanley Tigerman, built the notable house next door four decades ago.
“I had my work cut out for me to design a home next to their iconic residence,” Cerone wrote.
Credit: @properties Christie’s International Real Estate
Capped by a metal roof, the house is shaped like an H, with the swimming pool lying like an extension of one of the H’s legs. Outside, the high clerestory windows and a dark brick facade “create privacy from the street,” Cerone wrote, “while its entry garden softens the facade (from) looking too austere.”
The wall facing the rear yard has much more glass, mostly sliding doors below clerestories. Because of the sets of sliding doors, “at any point in the central part of the home, one can walk out to (the) back courtyard terrace,” he wrote.
Cerone designed the home with many windows to maximize both views of the verdant setting and natural light coming into the living spaces. The high-contrast look of the interior includes black window frames and cabinetry and white walls and ceilings.
Credit: @properties Christie’s International Real Estate
The tall fireplace wall divides the living room from a screened porch, finished almost entirely in black and smoke tones but relieved from feeling like a dark cave by walls of windows and doors a story and a half tall. With heated floors and a fireplace, it’s comfortable in three seasons, Cerone said.
At over $4 million, Cerone’s offering is at the upper end for Lakeside, where sales at over $3 million are rare but not unheard of. Two homes sold in the $3 million range in the past four years, according to Redfin, the online real estate marketplace, and one sold for the little town’s record price, $6.5 million, in 2023.
Credit: @properties Christie’s International Real Estate
Credit: @properties Christie’s International Real Estate
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