The house is located one acre of wooded land in Highland Park, IL, and is over 5000 square feet.  It has four bedrooms, 4 baths, and a heated and cooled garage.

Remember the car?  With the crashing out the….HA!  So, don’t do that.

This is the kitchen.  None of the listings say what kind of appliances it has, etc.  That could be because the house was built in 1953.  Who knows?  The kitchen might not have been updated.  That’s not always a bad thing.  You don’t have to undo a bunch of renovations that aren’t your taste.  But, for the purposes of this article, who cares?  I’m not trying to sell this house, I’m just trying to tell you about it and show you pictures.  So, here are some more pictures.

The bathroom.

The dining room.

The entrance.

Another exterior shot.

The office.  Nice view, eh?

A view of the pylons that hold the house suspended over the forest.

The spacious open floor plan.

More of the spacious open floor plan.

The house was designed by an architect named A. James Speyer.  Speyer graduated from Carnegie Tech in 1934, and he thought most of the architecture in the US was boring, so he went and spent 3 years in Europe.  He came back to the US and did a little more schooling before he started designing buildings in America.  He designed this post’s feature home for Ben Rose.  I don’t know anything about him, but his family lived in the home until very recently.

The garage addition was designed by Speyer’s student David Haid, who reportedly wasn’t a super nice guy.  But whatever.  It’s a pretty cool garage.

The house costs about $1.7 million dollars.  That’s a pretty good bargain for that size house in that part of Illinois, all things considered.  Actually, that’s a lie.  But it still isn’t as expensive as it was when they first listed it at $2.1 million dollars.

Gary decided to make the most of his space by implementing a sliding panel system that makes his apartment pretty much whatever he wants it to be.  Journalists and home enthusiasts have called the apartment “The Domestic Transformer” and the home was featured in The New York Times.

Check out the video:

Chang is obviously some sort of mad genius – the fact that he was able to design this setup and execute it speaks to his ingenuity and industry.  There are many, many tiny apartments in Hong Kong – and Chang is the first to think of this sort of solution to the problem of limited space.

The home is also considered ecologically friendly.  Chang has come up with a way to save on heating and cooling, and because his apartment gets pretty constant natural light he barely ever turns on the lights.

If we’re going to get technical about it, Chang’s apartment isn’t really 24 rooms – it’s really just an apartment with 24 possible configurations.

Chang has lived in this particular space since he was a young man.  The building was built in the 1960′s and when Chang first lived there he lived there with his mother and three sisters.  His father was a waiter in the United States.  Amazingly enough, during those days they also rented the third tiny partitioned bedroom to a tenant to help with the rent payment.

When Chang took possession of the apartment he began a lengthy four-renovation project that cost more than $200,000 and resulted in the remarkable apartment he lives in today.  It’s guys like this that make it so fun to write for this website!

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