Cartoonist Chris Ware on Jan. 16 sold a vintage, five-bedroom, Shingle-style Arts and Crafts-style home in Oak Park for $635,000.
Ware, who has produced graphic novels as well as his Acme Novelty Library comic book series, also has created cartoons for the Chicago publications Newcity and the Chicago Reader.
In Oak Park, Ware bought the 2,655-square-foot house in 2004 for $473,000 and subsequently restored it. Built in 1906, the three-story house has 1-1/2 bathrooms, interior woodwork that never has been painted, a beamed dining room ceiling, two working pocket doors, built-in cabinetry, living room ceiling fixtures that are a century old, a secondary staircase and a kitchen with an antique Hoosier cabinet, new oak floors, custom pantry cabinetry and a 1940s Chambers stove.
Other vintage features include push-button switches and dimmers and turnbuckle light switches, while the home also has a new roof, new copper gutters, a recently rebuilt chimney, a rebuilt back porch with a second-floor walk-out porch roof deck and a finished third floor with new wood windows and knee-wall closet storage. Outside are a 1.5-story garage with a wired second floor, an enclosed backyard with new red cedar fencing and a small playhouse.
Ware told Elite Street that he and his wife moved to the home shortly after their daughter was born, and that they had purchased it from ceramicist and painter Cora Markwart, who had lived there since the late 1960s.
”The house appealed to us for its surprising amount of original detail and tangible history,” Ware said. “Built by Oak Park developer Frank Alfred Hill, it was one of the last houses built on that block. The house had many original details, including the odd early turnbuckle light switches and some original light fixtures, and the woodwork had also never been painted — just as unusual then as it is now. Also intact was the “servant stair,” which connected access to the kitchen to a live-in maid’s quarters on the second floor. Over the years, we restored the exterior with cedar shingles, rebuilt the back porch and added a garage, which the house never had until we bought it, and tried to restore the interior elements which had been updated back as closely as possible to its original state.”
Ware first listed the house in October for $720,000, and found a buyer in November.
The house had a $19,329 property tax bill in the 2022 tax year.
Ware and his wife, Marnie, now live in Riverside, where they paid $1.14 million in 2017 for a vintage six-bedroom, 5,500-square-foot home.
The couple spent the past few years dividing their time between the two homes, in part because the Riverside house required more than two years of renovation. They did not move permanently to Riverside until the summer of 2023.
”It was my intention to hold onto (the Oak Park house) and to open it as a foundation for young cartoonists to live rent-free after graduation to work on graphic novels or other cartoon- and comics-related projects,” Ware said. “But the high taxes of Oak Park compelled me to give up that idea.”
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
