“Star Wars” filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, the president and co-CEO of Ariel Investments, want to combine their Michigan Avenue penthouse with one they bought from Ken Griffin, according to a Chicago Tribune report today.
The couple, who paid $18.75 million for the 65th floor at the Park Tower in the second-priciest home sale of 2015, have now emerged as the buyers who paid Griffin $11.2 million for the 66th floor in January 2023, according to the Tribune.
The connection became clear through a February application the property owners filed with Chicago building officials to get approval for construction work that will combine the two units into a single 16,000-square-foot residence.
The work, valued at a little more than $3.5 million, would bring Lucas and Hobson’s total investment in the property to $33.5 million.
That ranks it among a handful of properties at the extreme upper end of Chicago-area homes.
Only Griffin, the billionaire Citadel chief, has ever spent more on a Chicago residential property. In late 2017, he spent about $58.5 million for the top four floors of a Gold Coast building. He bought the space unfinished.
In mid-2022, when Griffin announced he would move both his company and his family to Florida and put several condominiums here on the market, it turned out he had never finished the $58.5 million space.
Although Griffin’s wasn’t a purchase of livable space, the comparison to the Lucas and Hobson package holds, because they, too, plan to make considerable change to the space.
The highest-priced Chicago home purchased as livable space was the two-story St. Regis penthouse that Mexican mining billionaire German Larrea bought for $20.56 million in 2022.
In Winnetka, billionaire Justin Ishbia is spending a total of about $77.6 million developing an estate including a behemoth mansion on three lakefront parcels he bought from separate owners.
George Lucas, whose net worth Forbes estimates at $5.5 billion, has made a string of major hit movies, from “American Graffiti” in 1973 through the “Star Wars” franchise that began in 1977 and the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” franchise that began in 1981.
Mellody Hobson, the Chicagoan who married Lucas in 2013, chairs the corporate board of Starbucks, is part owner of the Denver Broncos and formerly chaired the board of Dreamworks Animation, a company descended from the studio of another moviemaking great, Steven Spielberg.
The pair have other homes in California and elsewhere.
Griffin, who sold the 66th floor to the couple, still owns the 67th floor, which he has on the market for $15.75 million along with four other multimillion-dollar condominiums he owns at No. 9 Walton Street.
