You Can’t See the River From the Driveway
Some listings hand you the shot in the first ten seconds. This one made us walk for it.
8955 Van Emmon Road sits on just under an acre in Yorkville, and from the road it reads as a modest two-storey house with a lot of grass behind it. That is the whole problem. The best thing about the property is at the far end of the lot, out of sight from the driveway: over 100 feet of frontage on the Fox River, at the bottom of a lawn that runs down through mature trees to the bank.
The brief, as we understood it
A listing where the land outsells the house needs a different order of operations. Lead with the kitchen and you have already lost the argument. So we built the whole set around one idea: every frame is wider than the one before it.
What the house actually gives you
Two bedrooms, 1,400 square feet, built in 1961. It is what it is, and photographing it as something else would waste everyone’s time.
But two things are genuinely good, and both of them are about being outside. The first is a long bank of angled windows along the main living space: the one room in the house that spends the entire day looking at the lawn. The second is the deck. Between the main deck, the covered deck beneath it and the balcony, there is roughly 790 square feet of outdoor living space attached to a 1,400 square foot house. That ratio is the listing.
What we shot
A full day on site in early October, with the trees turning. Drone for the river and for the lot in context, ground photography for the interiors, the deck and the walk down to the water, and a complete floor plan set with and without dimensions.
Eight aerials. Thirty-two ground and interior frames. Forty finished photographs delivered.
A note on what is not in these pictures
The front of the house, with the number on the wall beside the door. We shot it, it went to MLS, and it stayed out of everything social, because on a listing the address is the point and on social media it is just a stranger’s address at full resolution. Same reason there are no licence plates and none of the neighbours in frame.
That is not a creative decision. It is the standard on every job we do.
8955 Van Emmon Road is listed by Jeffrey Padesky, JP Group at Real.
Ogi Optics is a real estate and small business media company in Mount Prospect, Illinois. Listing photography, drone, cinematic video, floor plans and realtor branding across Chicagoland.