In this real estate market, prices keep rising and rising to a point where it's almost embarrassing to write about a property when in the back of your mind you keep thinking "you get THAT for THAT???" This is not one of those houses. Compared to some of the hovels on offer in Miami Beach for literally the exact same price, this rather stately and elegant home in South Coconut Grove doesn't feel like its price, a cool $4 million, is extravagantly out of step with what's on offer.
The 1980 roared in Miami. Not only was the city's image and identity transformed in ways both good and bad, mixing global glamour with global intrigue, but the city itself changed physically. In that decade Greater Miami saw a building boom, blending luxury condo towers with avant-garde architecture, new public amenities and institutions, and a flood of stylish, luxury hotels catering to different kinds of travelers than the old beachside hostelries of earlier.
When the exquisitely wealthy businesswoman and philanthropist Adrienne Arsht listed her magnificent and massive Miami estate for sale in January, spectacularly priced at $150 million, it was a news item significant enough to command splashy spreads on the covers of the Miami Herald and the Wall Street Journal's Mansion section. To put it mildly, it was a major, major news item, not just because it could set a new record for the most expensive residential sale in South Florida, but because of the size, prominence, and history of the property itself.
Acclaimed Miami-based architect Rene Gonzalez's Prairie Residence, completed in 2017 on a landlocked residential street in the heart of Miami Beach just off sunny and somewhat hostile Dade Boulevard, is one of his most extraordinary designs to date and a really masterful yet particularly unusual home. The 3,312-square-foot contemporary luxury residence was designed for its environment and its future environment, impacted by forces such as sea-level rise. Priced at a precise $15,151,000 apparently, the house has been on the market since last November, and, well, it's still here.
With just over one acre of land on South Bayshore Drive, the rambling estate of John T. Peacock, a member of Coconut Grove's founding Peacock family, this 111-year-old historic pile is on an unusually large piece of land for a property in the heart of the Grove. Overlooking Kennedy Park, and an old sheltered inlet that practically ends at its front gate, the listing is asking for a healthy $12.9 million.
Onda Residences, a high-end luxury condominium being developed by CMC Group and Morabito Properties, had its ceremonial groundbreaking today, as one of the few in-person real estate events that are finally starting to happen these days. The building, which features 41 residences beginning at $1.8 million a pop, is on the former site of the Bay Harbour Continental, a MiMo residential building that was a gem of midcentury flair and which preservationists fought, unsuccessfully, to preserve.
When you take a spectacular piece of early modernist architecture, such as this streamlined moderne house on Pine Tree Drive by important Miami Beach architect Igor Polevitzkty, and give it some bland contemporary renovations that are supposed to "improve" it while blending in with the existing architecture, the results often leave something to be desired.
When architectural critic and curator John Margolies took these photos in the early days of South Beach's art deco revival, from approximately 1980 to 1990, many thought it was a lost architectural cause, or perhaps not even worth the effort. But Margolies's photos document the raw beauty of South Beach's architecture at the time and are a stark comparison to what came later, as anybody who has seen what South Beach has become can immediately tell. These were the dark days of Miami Beach's art deco resurgence, but the light would soon come.
Designed by Achille Salvagni, an Italian designer and architect who has done some incredible yacht interiors but also has a flair for midcentury Italian design, this 7,400 square foot new-build in Mid-Beach was designed almost like a superyacht itself. The house has curvilinear lines and fabulous materials, creating custom elements like a kitchen that looks more like a sculptural art installation than a place to make food, and a bronze and gold grand staircase. It's also got a pool that, at 90 feet in length, spans almost the entire 111-foot width of the property itself. Originally listed for $21 million in March, it got a price cut to $19 million, according to the MLS, in May.
Chayo Frank, architect of the famously eclectic Amertec Building in Hialeah, has listed his own home, an equally bold creation in Ponce-Davis, for $14.995 million. Although the Amartec Building, a freeform concrete structure that looked like a fantastical abstraction of a sea monster, was demolished a few years ago, Frank's house, luckily, is beautifully pristine.
