Filed under: Estates

My mom, who moved to Florida last year from Massachusetts, says that in Florida everyone’s home looks like a furniture store. That’s definitely true of today’s estate, an extravagant 12,000 square-foot home located on 7.8 acres in Ocala, Florida. The home has six bedrooms total including a big master suite. The home includes a chef’s kitchen that leads to a family room with a beverage center, wine cellar, computer station and walk-in pantry. Outdoor areas include a pool, a lanai with a double-sided fireplace, tennis court and an outdoor kitchen. The upstairs left wing is an entire floor dedicated to amusing with a game room, card room, billiards/family room, media room, exercise room, 1.5 baths and beverage center built from an air balloon basket. The upstairs right wing has three bedrooms and can serve as guest quarters or the children’s wing. The manor office has 30 foot ceilings, double-sided fireplace, a built-in library with special ceiling treatment and opens to covered lanai. The main guest suite is secluded and private on the first floor. No pictures of the bedrooms or baths on this one but I suspect they are just more of the beige same. This home is listed at $5 million.

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Out on the flats of the prairie in Johnston, Iowa, sits this surprising home, a French-styled chateau plunked down into the heart of the midwest. This ten-year-old home presents an elegant exterior with it’s tree-lined driveway but inside it’s a bit quirky. You’ve got a sort of country kitchen, a dark wood study packed to the brim with fish and game trophies and antiques everywhere. The first floor public rooms have columns and some charming plaster details but then you’ve got my personal pet peeve, those round lights inset into the ceilings in the bedrooms which rather destroy the classic effect. The home is 8264 square feet and there are five bedrooms. The exterior includes a private pond and a swimming pool on 4.66 acres. It’s a lot of house for not that much money, it’s listed at $1.495 million.

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Filed under: Estates

I was going to leave this one for the Sunday real estate round-up but a couple of you’ve mentioned it to me in the tips I decided to take a look at it a tiny early. And rightly so, a $64 million townhouse is worth a post to itself. The Henry T. Sloane mansion on East 68th Street in New York City would be the most high-priced townhouse sold in city if it sells for the asking price (a record of $53 million was set for the Harkness mansion in 2006). It’s not the most high-priced listing price, as far as I know, the penthouse at the Pierre listed for $70 million still claims that honor.

Why so much? Part of it is location, the townhouse is located just steps away from Fifth Avenue on the East Side. Part of it is size, the building has 18,500 square feet total spread out over five stories. Two of the stories have 17-foot ceilings. There are 15 bedrooms and 17 bathrooms, seven fireplaces, a ballroom and a rooftop garden. Part of the lure is the history and design, the mansion was designed by architect Charles Pierrepont H. Gilbert for Sloane, the heir to a furniture empire, in 1905. The home is classic Beaux-Arts style and five of the rooms have all their original details intact. The wood-paneled ballroom with original oil-painted murals is particularly noteworthy.

The real estate broker Paula Del Nunzio and Brown Harris Stevens, the real estate firm she works for, could split a commission of $3.8 million on the sale. These days it’s hard to predict just how a expensive listing will behave. Some stay on the market for years until the right buyer with enough cash comes along. Some are snapped up almost immediately. This one, given the size, location and history probably won’t linger long.

[Thanks Lana and David]

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Filed under: Estates

The Magnolia farm in Sonoma, California is the town’s oldest East Side home and is a registered historical landmark. It has also been given a very modern rehabilitation that is a world away from its classic exterior). The home was built in the 1890s and has been owned by members of the Hearst family among other great California families. The property has a four-bedroom main house as well as a one-bedroom guest home. There’s also a swimming pool, outdoor barbecue and a one acre lawn with room for croquet, bocce and horseshoes. The property is almost ten acres total and includes magnolia, olive, fig and maple trees. An outdoor patio offers dining for eight. it is currently being used as a wine country rental that costs $12,000 a week (many more gorgeous pictures are available at the home’s rental website). It is listed at $5.495 million.

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Filed under: Estates

Hard times have hit a couple of massive South Florida condo projects with two major condominium developers having filed for bankruptcy last week.. Strada 315 LLC, the developer of Fort Lauderdale’s Strada 315, filed Chapter 11 after selling 48 of its 117 units. The 21-floor condo tower was selling off condos for between $230,000 and $600,000.Regions Financial Corp., the largest bank based in Alabama, originally lent $34.5 million to the project. About $16 million was paid off as the condos were sold but Regions would not extend the loan. The developers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last week, saying they owe at least $50 million in debts to this bank and other lending partners. The company will continue operating as U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Miami court reorganizes its debts.

Beach House Property LLC, which is connected to Beach Home Designed by Richard Meier, at 9449 Collins Ave in Surfside filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday. The 101-unit condo was set to be built on the property of the Beach Home Hotel and would offer 101 condos at prices starting at around $1.5 million. The company owes its 20 largest unsecured creditors $4.6 million.

What’s the future of these two projects? At Strada there are sales contracts on 51 of the remaining 69 units, but it is expected that some of these will not close due to the current grim conditions facing South Florida condominiums. The situation for the Beach Home is even murkier. Apparently the project is way behind schedule and has according to a comprehensive article by Kevin Tomlinson of the South Beach Condo blog, been through several developers already. It’s a shame since the project, shown at left, is the first Meier project in the area and attracted a lot of attention when it was first announced.

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Filed under: Estates

Huge construction is going on in downtown Pittsburgh. The downtown area which has long been in a say of slow decline is looking to be revitalized thanks to a couple of major projects especially the Piatt Place project. Piatt Place will be a redesign of the Lazarus department store building. Two upscale chain restaurants, McCormick and Schmick’s and the Capital Grille will anchor the building and the rest of the building will be turned into offices and condos. The residential units are new construction, built on a new slab on top of the roof. The condos start $330,000 to $1.5 million each and in an article on KDKA it has been reported that 40% of the units are under contract.

But in a nationwide market that is not, for the most part, favoring condos, there may be trouble ahead. For example at another high-end project in Pittsburgh, 151 First Side, owners have shut on more than half of the 83 units but a handful are already up for resale. At the Carlyle, a project that has currently a 6,000-square-foot penthouse listed at $2.195 million, half of the 60 units are under contract but many of those buyers are investors and the second phase of the project is on hold. It seems that the problem in Pittsburgh isn’t so much a condo glut of the type that has affected so many other cities, but instead is a question of changing people’s perceptions of life downtown and whether or not people are willing to pay these types of prices when for the same amount of money they could get a fairly massive home in the suburbs.

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Filed under: Estates

This home in the village of Indian Hill in Cincinnati, Ohio has me smitten for one reason “the Canterbury room.” This home built in 1933 has a two-story library wing called the Canterbury room which features raised quotations in stone above the fireplace from Chaucer, Dante and Shakespeare and looks like an English great hall. The home is approximately 13,000 square feet and sits on nine acres. There are nine bedrooms total and the home includes all sorts of stained glass, carved stone and wood details that add to the feeling that this is a treasure from another era. At $8.7 million, it’s a high price for the area but this is a truly stunning home right down to the stone carving of the home and its name, Cobble Court, on the wall.

Related: This isn’t the only Cobble Court around, check out Cobble Court in Glen Cove, New York, an estate we featured in October 2006.

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Donald Trump’s billion-dollar Scottish golf course may be on hold, so he has turned his rapacious attentions to Ireland and the remains of the Mountpather Home. The 170-acre estate once boasted one of the finest country houses in Ireland but now the 18th century country home has fallen into disrepair. The elegant facade remains but the home’s roof was removed over 30 years ago so the owners could avoid paying tax rates on the property. The fireplaces and interior fittings have either been removed or have collapsed leaving a crumbling shell of a home.

Mountpather Home is just one of several properties that Donald Trump’s representatives have looked at while scoping out the right spot for Trump’s Irish golf course development. The estate is located in an area with other esteemed golf courses and is located around 40 minutes drive away from Belfast and two hours from Dublin. The property is listed at

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Filed under: Estates

Imagine owning your own ancient Italian monastery. Antico Monastero is an old monastery dating back to the 13th Century. It is located on the top of a hill in the countryside around Perugia. It has been restored into a luxury accommodation. There are 11 bedrooms and 11 bathrooms as well as an owner’s apartment with a reception room, studio, kitchen, loo and two bedrooms. There is also an old church, and stables which have been converted into a restaurant with professional kitchen. The restoration preserved the original structure with its arches and vaulted ceilings and used original materials, like terracotta and stone to pave the floors and wood for most of the furniture to maintain the consistent look of the property. The land includes both chestnut woods and pasture land. It is listed at 2.3 million euros.

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Filed under: Estates, Celebrity Shopping

Just a week ago, we mentioned the opening of the Beatles hotel in Liverpool, for those with more cash and a deeper case of Beatlemania you can own a flat once rented by the Beatles in London for

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