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...' "
