A 10,000-square-foot Lake Forest house comes complete with ceiling murals that depict scenes such as a dinner hosted by Cleopatra.
Sixteen years after building the six-bedroom house on Gavin Court not as a home but strictly as a place to showcase their collection of works by sculptors, painters, taxidermists and others, Alfonso “Lon” and Linda Mellijor listed the property Jan. 27, asking just under $3 million.
The asking price is below their total investment in the real estate itself, not counting the extensive murals and other decorative finishes, said Lon Mellijor, a retired cancer surgeon. In 2003 they paid $1.65 million to buy the house from a builder who had completed less than three-quarters of it, he said. (Linda Mellijor is traveling and unavailable for comment.)
In the early 2000s, the couple planned to build a museum building near their home in Winthrop Harbor, Mellijor said, but ultimately decided that west Lake Forest would be a better spot for attracting attention to the work of the artists they collect and support.
“When we like artists, we commission them to do their very best work for us, and we show it here” at weddings and events they host at the house and on private tours, Mellijor said. More than a dozen sculptures stand on the 1.8-acre grounds, visible to passersby on Waukegan Road. Inside the house are many more sculptures as well as paintings and antique artifacts such as Peruvian mirrors and hand-painted buffalo hides.
The collections are arranged in the house thematically, and most rooms have both art that will be removed at sale time and artistic finishes that will not. The ground-floor room that would have been the master bedroom is filled with framed paintings and artifacts of the American West, which will be removed, and capped by a full-ceiling mural of a vast landscape that resembles Monument Valley, which will stay.
“We want someone to have this who appreciates it all,” Mellijor said. “That’s what’s important, not making a profit.” Hence the price that starts out below their total investment in the home.
“When we started this 16 years ago, I never thought about selling it one day,” Mellijor said.
The basement contains the Mellijors’ collection of taxidermy animals, all crafted by a taxidermist who acquired only animals who had died in zoos. “I think hunting beautiful animals for trophies is such a waste,” Mellijor said. “I would not buy those.”
The collection includes a pair of tigers in repose in one room. In another, where the original builder put a small indoor pool, the Mellijors drained it and put in 10 animals—lions, zebras, monkeys, a water buffalo—in a scene around a watering hole (where a mirror takes the place of the water’s surface).
While not included in the price of the house, the African diorama and some other art is available to the eventual buyer, Mellijor said. Much of it is being transferred to not-for-profit museums, by sale and by donation, as the Mellijors have advanced in age.
A buyer will have to make some changes. In the master bath, the tub was covered by a tile top that serves as a platform for sculptures, and “there’s not really a kitchen,” said Patrick Milhaupt, one of two Jameson Sotheby’s International Realty agents representing the house. On the main floor there’s a warming kitchen for caterers to use, and there’s a small kitchen in the basement.
“You’re going to have to build out a kitchen if you’re going to live here full-time,” Milhaupt said. Mellijor said he and his wife built a bedroom suite on the second floor where they could stay after events, “but we always decided to just go home instead.” A mural artist lived for a while in an apartment in the garage, but otherwise the home has not been occupied, Milhaupt said.
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