Oprah Winfrey is honored by Mayor Richard M. Daley outside of Harpo Studios… (Abel Uribe/ Chicago Tribune)
November 15, 2011|By Bob Goldsborough | Tribune reporter
Talk-show host and media giant Oprah Winfrey has placed an eight-room, 4,607-square-foot co-op unit in Streeterville up for rent for $15,000 a month.
Winfrey, who ended her long-running Chicago-based talk show earlier this year, spends much of her time in California and Hawaii. She paid $5.6 million for the three-bedroom co-op unit in 2006. But the talk-show queen never actually moved into the unit, choosing instead to remain in her massive duplex condominium spread in a different building a few blocks away.
Now, Winfrey has placed the co-op unit up for rent for the first time. The sixth-floor co-op is one of 13 apartments in a Beaux Arts-style building that was built in 1913 and designed by architect Benjamin Marshall. Features in the unit include three full baths, two half baths, 10-foot ceilings, two fireplaces, an inner foyer, a library, a solarium, a formal dining room, a butler's pantry, a wine room, a custom kitchen, a 1,241-square-foot master bedroom with his and her bathrooms and an en-suite guest bedroom.
Winfrey briefly listed the unit for sale for $6 million from June 2008 until January 2009.
Listing agent Todd Vitale of Prudential Rubloff declined to comment on the listing. A spokeswoman for Winfrey declined to comment.
Winfrey owns several other pieces of residential real estate in the Chicago area, including a house in Elmwood Park that she purchased in 2001 for $298,000 and a house in Merrillville, Ind. Her primary residence is her estate in Montecito, Calif., which she purchased in 2001 for a reported $50 million.
