A notoriously gaudy and gigantic mansion located in the town of Hillsboro Beach, next to Fort Lauderdale, known as both Playa Vista Isle and Le Palais Royale sold at auction in November for a ‘record setting,’ price. However, the actual price itself was kept quiet by both buyer and seller until now, when the Sun Sentinel noticed that the sale had been recorded by the Broward County Property Appraiser, and made public record, revealing both the amount, and the buyer. It sold for $42.5 million.
More specifically, the house itself sold for $37 million and the empty adjacent lot for $5.4 million, a significant discount over the previous listing price, which had ranged between $139 million and $159 million. The tax appraiser had even previously valued it at $85 million. It’s still, however, the highest-priced home ever sold in Broward County, though it is eclipsed by higher priced sales in both Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties, to either side of it.
For most of its short lifespan, the house had gone by the name of Le Palais Royale, but the last sales team appears to have changed it.
As for the new owner, well, rather unsurprisingly, it was purchased by an LLC called Oppornova, of Delaware. Perhaps slightly surprisingly, however, considering the oligarch-chic aesthetic, it appears the house may have been purchased by an American. As the Sun Sentinel points out, a director of Oppornova LLC is Andrew Mack, who has the same name and thus might be the same person as the former CEO of Teavana, a tea retailer which was sold to Starbucks in 2012 for $620 million.
Inspired by Versailles (obviously), and located at 935 and 939 Hillsboro Mile the house was designed by Miami-based architect Denio Madera. The estate includes a whopping (approximately) 500 feet of private oceanfront beach and five acres of land, spans from the ocean to the Intracoastal Waterway, and includes two deepwater yacht docks.
Playa Vista Isle/Le Palais Royal has 11 bedrooms, 22 baths, 22-karat gold leaf gilding throughout (and when they say “throughout” they mean throughout. That stuff is everywhere). It has the world’s first private 3D-IMAX home theater, and a 20 car garage with secure tunnel access. There’s a 3,000 bottle wine cellar, with individually-controlled temperature and humidity secured by biometric access, and adjacent tasting rooms. The pool complex, which is a more accurate term than just ‘pool’ here, includes 13 water features, six waterfalls, and a jacuzzi perched 40 feet above the ocean. Oh, and there’s a putting green.
Just to the north is an adjoining piece of empty oceanfront property which was attached a few years ago, and that the original owner had planned to build a guesthouse and underground sports complex on, but apparently did not. It could be sold off by the new owner, landscaped to create extensive gardens, or built on.
When the house was first built and listed for sale, even before its completion, people (including me) were incredulous at just how lavish and gilded it is, as well as the location. Hillsboro Beach in Broward County, although very nice, did not seem like the kind of neighborhood one would build a house of this enormity and price tag. It seemed overvalued for the land, and like a giant golden thing that had missed its target and washed up a little too far south of Palm Beach. In fact, why wasn’t Le Palais Royal in Palm Beach? Plopped on the market brand new in 2014, it made a bizarre spec property designed for someone with very, very particular tastes. Let’s hope it found that person now.
