Filed under: Estates

I would have taken bets that Donald Trump wouldn’t get his $100 million price for the home he’s been trying to sell in Palm Beach, Florida for two years but I would have lost. The Palm Beach Post reports that Trump has sold the property he purchased in 2004 from Abe Gosman for his desired price. Trump purchased the home for $41.35 million and spent another $25 million in a renovation headed by Kendra Todd, winner of the third season of The Apprentice. He first put it on the market for $125 million which made it the most expensive home for sale in the U.S. but even Trump knew that price was optimistic and predicted three years ago that it would go for $100 million.

The home has nine bedrooms, a ballroom and a conservatory as celebration of its 62,000 square foot expanse. It also has a 48-car garage. Believe it or not, the unnamed buyer might tear down the huge mansion and subdivide. The waterfront property has been a prized piece of land for over 100 years and has the current home, Maison de L’Amitié, was only built in 1990. The property is appraised at $58 million by the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser’s Office, meaning the 2007 tax bill at $980,033, is higher than the price of many homes in America. Trump’s sale comes after a rash of large home sales in Palm Beach including Jones Apparel Group founder Sidney Kimmel who recently sold his home in the area for its $81.5 million list price.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Estates

I don’t have great pictures or a lot of details on this one but it’s special enough to cover based on size alone. This is the home of the Craven family, who owns Craven Original, a company that creates fine home gardening products and pottery. The home is an Italian-style villa on a whopping 1,410 acres at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in a small town north of Atlanta, Georgia. There are currently seven homes on the property. It took the Craven family 28 years to collect the property which is also home to 850 cows, 450 of which have calves. There are 20 barns and sheds for hay storage. The property includes miles of fencing and gates spread out over three counties. The land also includes five ponds and three miles of Chandler Creek that could maintain a 250 acre lake to produce power and water for municipalities. The land itself is zoned for 2400 plus homes, golf course, retail center or can be left as a horse and cattle ranch.

The main home is 18,000 square feet and is built on a grand scale with 16 to 32 foot ceilings and 317 arches and a 540,000 artistically laid brick, tile roof, two eight-foot by 16-foot chandeliers in the great hall. All the architectural details such as cupolas, balustrades, fountains and statues were sculpted and cast by Craven Original. Much of it such as the ironwork was manufactured by members of the Craven family. I’m told that the property is appraised at $49 million, but is available for $31 million.

%Gallery-22885%

Continue reading Craven Villa, Estate of the Day

Read

Share This

Share This

Back in the late 19th century/early 20th there were parlors. We had a house built in 1892 that had a lovely parlor with pocket doors. Then there were formal living rooms, which we paid a lot of money for the furniture for and never used. I remember a home I had in Cleveland with very pricey furniture in the living room. We would pass through it on the way to the formal dining room (which we never used either).

When I was a kid, we spent time in the basement…furnished or semi-furnished, of course. Then we moved the basement upstairs and it became a family room and that’s where we spent all of our time. I remember those red-shag carpeted family rooms with the glass-back bars. Do you?

Then in the 70s and 80s the “great room” concept came into being. A much superior idea, I thought. We’re scaling down even more now, making rooms do double-duty and doing with less. The phenomenon has been called the “shrinking house.” Like our large vehicles, our massive houses are getting too pricey to operate. We went from small houses in the 50s to much larger houses in the next few decades, back to smaller houses.

It’s time to cut back, live more simply. We can save some trees by not buying all of that furniture, and maybe we can actually connect with our families because we don’t get separated in those gimongous house.

For example:

• Sarah Susanka created the “Not So Huge House” to “bring to light a new way of thinking about what makes a place feel like home”
• The Small Home Society pegs itself as a resource for the small home movement
• Small Home Style is a magazine dedicated to all things small home.

These people use terms like “sustainable resources” and simple, and we’re speaking 800 sq. ft. houses here. The small house movement is, shall I state, “growing.”

What about you? Are you ready for a small home?

Tags: baby boomers, shrinking house, small house society

Share This

Share This

Share This