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Wow. This real estate listing is full of amazing color! If you enjoy looking at unusual interior decoration, take a look at the listing itself (link below). There are a few more photos of the piano room, but here are two.

Can anyone identify the piano? I can't make it out.





If I were going to buy this house, I would want them to leave all the furnishings and artwork. And crazy wallpaper. I don't usually like this kind of interior design, but for some reason I love everything about this house! Too bad I don't live in Chicago... or have a spare 5.5 million dollars lying around...

$5.5 million home in Chicago

I believe it’s a D.H. Baldwin with a player system. So most likely the owners don’t know how to play. Just a cocktail party piano. lol. If I had a $5M home, I’d sure have a much nicer piano then a D.H. Baldwin. A Bosendorfer 😁😁😁

What MAlex said, the words look like DH Baldwin and I can see the font a little bit.

Level 2
What kind of player system?

Well in my 2 minute Google research effort looks like it could be a QRS Pianomotion 2000. Definitely not my area of expertise. Lol.

If that’s right then LEVEL 3:
What the heck is that bench 😳

Thanks MAlex!


Very unfortunate is what that bench is!!

I agree; it does look like a D.H. Baldwin (AKA Samick). And, they sure did alter and stretch the photo a lot. I guess they are trying to stretch out the sale price as much as possible.

Real estate is through the roof for sure. A small house (1400 sq ft?) with vinyl siding, across the road from me, on 2 acres, just came up for sale for $285,000. I hope it sells and they get their price. I wouldn't pay anywhere near that much. Guess I'm way out of touch with real estate reality.

And, getting back to the topic at hand, a D. H. Baldwin grand, with a player system, isn't that impressive for a $5M home. If they cut corners on the grand piano, where else did they cut corners?

Rick

Well looking at few listings for late 1990’s DH Baldwin’s, C172’s etc, (indeed made by Samick) they came with vinyl upholstered benches with the same brass capped feet. So I guess the interior designer here didn’t like the brown vinyl and it was reupholstered with that lovely chartreuse fabric. Lol.

Speaking of cheap pianos in expensive houses…. The family home of one of my closest friends sold in January of this year for $13 million. They had custom built the home in the 90’s and had a “piano closet” built in dining room with a pair of double doors that when open exposed:

Their mother’s childhood, tired 1950’s Wurlitzer spinet. 😫😫😫. They weren’t piano people and it was only rarely used when they hired a pianist for cocktail parties etc. I spent a lot of time in the house during a period when I was without a piano, but never bothered to play it since it was so uninspiring. Always thought it was a shame they did’t have had a piano that was the same caliber as the house.

Location, location, location right? Imagine what 2 acres in Manhattan or Tokyo would cost...

Such a fascinating tour! Thanks for posting! - It's always so interesting to see other people's taste, especially in different countries.

Monviso, glad you enjoyed the photos! I also like looking at real estate listings in Europe, although they're harder for me to find!

On the topic of real estate prices, yep, the prices are just insane! A house in our neighborhood just went on the market, it's listed for about $100,000 more than what we paid for our house. Same number of bedrooms and bathrooms, but no basement (we have a walk-out basement that's half finished and half a concrete room, we have a huge space for exercise equipment down there and Mr SK's studio is there). Oh and our property is about twice as big as the one that's just been listed. Too bad we're not planning on moving, or downsizing. I would imagine that anyone ready to downsize would really clean up.

Back to the piano... good point about the photo being stretched out. I bet they didn't even need to do that. It's obvious from the listing photo that the room where the piano is is a pretty big room (what with having two sets of sitting furniture)....

Still fun to look at though!

I don't think it's intentional. You simply must use a wide angle lens when photographing small residential rooms (conveniently, doing so also makes the rooms look larger!) and a rectilinear wide lens has a distortion effect that stretches out the corners like this.

Gombessa, good point.

And really, these listing photos are fine. I've seen some that are so bad, it's hard to imagine what the photographer was thinking! One listing I looked at recently had all the photos, every single one, at odd angels, browsing through them was like being on a ship in the middle of a bad storm!

I do not like the colour of those peachy/pink chairs.A more formal colour for me would have been better in that room.The piano looks fine, an older Baldwin semi concert would be nice though.I love the drapes!

I don't mind the chairs, but that piano bench is . I suppose I could live in that apartment if I really had to...

I'm familiar with that area, they must have bought multiple adjacent buildings and combined them to get 7000 sqft, those were pretty modest places when they were originally built. There's probably no neighbors left to complain if they play the piano loud, they bought all the neighbor's houses.

Good Lord, that was rather, shall we say as the Germans: Prunkvoll!!

I love those pink furnishings! Just goes to show there's no accounting for taste!


Mark, good point, I hadn't thought about that. Very interesting.

Once I saw “Chicago”, I didn’t even need to look at the listing to know this was the Gold Coast. I have a few friends that live in that area, and this photo just reeks of the kind of homes you’d find there. Either tall luxury condos, or vintage old-style homes like this. Sky-high rent prices to match the sky-high buildings. But it’s always nice to rub shoulders with the significantly more wealthy Gold-Coasters when I’m there.

“Unusual interior decoration” is right. Normally, I love a very gilded & lushly fabric-covered room, and have tried to decorate my music room very similarly (although with admittedly cheaper materials lol) but the colors are a bit much for my tastes. I tend to be more of a color-matcher/same-color-family type.

And yeah, it’s a DH Baldwin. The clearer photos on the page confirm that. As others have said, I doubt these people even play the piano, as they’d certainly go for something better if they did. Typical wealthy people for whom the piano is merely an entertainment piece. It probably plays a few tunes for their delight, and maybe they know someone who plays the piano and who may play on it occasionally. However, I doubt it was purchased for regular play or enjoyment. It may also be a vintage, in-the-family type piano. That’s the only other option I can see.

Agree with Gombessa, also. Real estate photography tends to use this kind of lens for photographing the rooms and the stretch effect is a side-effect of the lens. While shopping around for a study to use during the pandemic, I saw this often. And it was always such a shock to actually visit the place when selecting a study, only to find it looked much smaller than the gorgeously wide photos.