In the early 1990s, Richard Marx, the soft-rock star known for his hits Now and Forever and Right Here and Waiting, was looking for a house to raise his young children. He and his wife at the time, actress Cynthia Rhodes, looked at properties around the U.S. before settling on a 1931 mansion on Lake Michigan, about 40 minutes’ drive north of Chicago. “There were just a lot of parameters I needed to fill,” said Marx. “I needed room for a large family, I needed to entertain guests, and I needed a recording studio, so I wouldn’t have to fly back and forth to LA.”
The house was designed for a meatpacking heir by David Adler, a Chicago-area architect famed for his Gilded Age mansions. Originally set on close to 70 acres, the grounds had been whittled down to a five-acre plot. The house itself, Marx said, had seen better days. “The electrical system had these old, gigantic fuses,” he said. “If someone plugged in a toaster and a hair dryer at the same time, the whole house would blow out.”
As for the decor, “There was this orange shag carpet,” he said. “So many of the rooms looked like a porn set from 1975.” After pulling up the carpet though, he found classic walnut floors. “It was a little bit a of a head-scratcher,” Marx admitted. “But the bones of the house were magnificent.”
The renovation took two years, and Marx, Rhodes (who memorably played Penny, the ill-fated dance instructor in Dirty Dancing) and their children moved in in 1997. After he and his wife separated in 2013, though, they put the house on the market, listing it initially for a cool $18 million. Two years later, the price has come down by more than $6 million. It’s now listed for $11.99 million.
The house weighs in at a massive 29,745 square feet and has seven bedrooms, eight full bathrooms, and six half-baths. But while many mansions of this size have wings that “are sort of relegated to being dusty and uncared for, our house was lived in, all the time,” Marx said. “There were always a lot of people around.”
Marx’s interventions in the original layout were judicious. He turned the servant’s quarters above the kitchen—a warren of small rooms—into a movie theater, and he expanded the kitchen to include a large, informal dining room and a TV area. “It’s all one, big space for families now,” he said. “For people who like that kind of thing, I’ve never seen anything better.”
The other major addition was the recording studio Marx built, which overlooks the lake. “Most recording studios are all walls and no light,” he said. “But to have a studio where you have floor to ceiling windows overlooking Lake Michigan, it’s very inspiring.”
Inside the home, the ground floor is given over to entertaining spaces—a formal dining room, a formal living room, a breakfast room, and a study—while the upper floor has most of the bedrooms. (There are a few more, along with a gym, in the finished attic.)
Homey as the house might be, it’s still, at the end of the day, a grand, giant mansion. “There’s a beautiful centerpiece at the end of the driveway,” Marx said. “It’s pretty impressive as you’re driving up to the gate.” The rest of the property is mostly rolling lawns leading down to the lakeshore. The land, Marx said, is full of potential. “A pool could really go there for sure, and I thought about it,” he said, but added that he did not because “I’d only be using it for three months, anyway.”
The house, Marx said, “is a very special place. It was an amazing space to raise a family and a great workspace for me.”