For sale: 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, steel frame wrapped in plastic

A Chicago architecture professor has completed a steel-framed house wrapped in a marine-grade plastic on a half-acre site in the northwest suburbs. He listed it for sale late last week at $549,000.

A visible grid of rectangular panels wraps the exterior of the three-bedroom, 2,200-square-foot house in Keeneyville, an unincorporated area near the Chicago suburb of Roselle. They're made of a "high density polyethylene — plastic — that is meant to take harsh weather," said Alphonso Peluso, who designed the house and is a studio associate professor of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

The plastic is a 'rain screen,' or exterior skin, that conceals the building's steel frame and layers of insulation, Peluso said. The steel is visible inside the house as roof trusses that span the open-plan rooms.

In a neighborhood of mostly conventional homes, "somebody will want to be the pioneer with a bespoke house that isn't what all their neighbors have," Peluso said.

Because of the steel framing, there's no need for load-bearing interior walls, Peluso said, "so we can have a very open living space, very light."

He designed the house with durability as a prime goal. Steel is sturdy and long-lasting, and the PE panels "won't need paint or replacing," Peluso said. "They'll be there for good."

Those durable materials, as well as spray-foam insulation, radiant heat in the floors of all three levels and other 'green' features "are definitely important to buyers," said Rocky LaGioia, the GMC Realty agent representing the house.

LaGioia said the location in a hilly neighborhood of large lots will also appeal, but he added that "we know the contemporary look makes it a little bit of a challenge."

The master suite is alone on the second floor, with a balcony spanning 40 feet on one side and windows looking in all four directions. "It's pretty serene up there," LaGioia said.

In the kitchen and baths, Peluso chose textured wood cabinetry doors, but otherwise, "there's not a lot of ornamentation," he said.

Peluso, who studied architecture at IIT and later worked for famed contemporary architect Helmut Jahn, built three residential buildings in the Chicago area before this one, he said. They are a 5,700-square-footer in Bloomingdale, a brick six-flat in Chicago's Dunning neighborhood, and his own home, which he described as "more aggressive, architecturally," than the Keenyville house, which he completed earlier this month.