House cleaning in Glenview, IL

Glenview is inland, as Northbrook is, and its place in the North Shore is by association rather than geography: there is no lake frontage here, no bluff and no Sheridan Road. What it has instead is a fifth of the town that used to be a naval air station. The Glen is eleven hundred acres cleared of runways and rebuilt from nothing, with its own town center, a large park around a man-made lake and the preserved control tower. The Grove on Milwaukee Avenue is a National Historic Landmark, and Wagner Farm is a working farm the park district owns.

Three layers of housing sit on top of each other. The oldest, a small share of the village, is around the old downtown: early twentieth-century bungalows, foursquares and Colonial Revivals, plus The Park, a community laid out in 1894 in an oval around a common green. The dominant layer is the postwar one, full of split-levels and raised ranches from the 1950s through the 1970s. The newest is The Glen, barely older than this century and built to a different standard entirely.

The split-levels decide most visits. Half a flight up to the bedrooms, half a flight down to the family room and another to the utility level means nothing rolls between floors, so the vacuum and the caddy are carried four or five times in a house. Glenview buys treated Lake Michigan water from Wilmette, which is moderately hard, so glass shower doors, chrome and glass cooktops film over and come clean with the right product rather than more scrubbing. It is the same water in every house on the block, and it is far gentler than the private wells behind our Barrington Hills and Inverness pages.

Glenview is the one town we serve with two ZIP codes, 60025 and 60026, and both are priced the same way. Enter your ZIP and your rooms and the number is on the screen before you give us your name.