Sometimes a property arises that appears to be the absolute definition of obscenely luxurious decadence, to practically an irresponsible degree. That's one way to describe this rental that recently hit the market at 242 Washington Avenue for an absolutely lavish $21,000 a month, in the heart of South Beach's South-of-Fifth enclave.
The quaint cottage at 3564 Avocado Ave, in the heart of the South Grove, combines a home originally built in 1936, replete with brick walls, a blue front door, Pecky Cypress paneling, and a gabled roof, along with a breezier section with sliding glass doors and a beamed ceiling that may have been added a few decades later to open out to the pool. Containing four bedrooms and four baths in just under 3,000 square feet, the house feels like a charming melange of old-Miami charm from a few different eras, with a huge price tag that seems appropriate for the maniacal post-pandemic housing market of today. Newly listed at $3.5M, the owners are asking more than twice what the house went for merely four years ago. Check out the photos, below.
Just a few months ago, this 10,000 square foot Palm Beach estate on a sweeping piece of property facing Lake Worth sold for a whopping $55 million, which any sane person might think was an impressive enough price tag, after having been on the market for about five months. But this is how over-the-top the current real estate market is. The house appears to have been almost immediately whallopped back onto the market, with a new listing price of $79 million. If that brash of a flip isn't proof we live in truly bizarre real estate times, than what is?
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.
This unassuming cottage, with its raw, unifinished wood siding and unkempt jungle of a yard in South Miami, looks practically abandoned. Yet, the property, located at 6401 SW 42nd Terrace, hit the market four days ago for a not-immoddest $515,000. A lot of that asking price can be blamed on the 9,000 square foot corner lot, as well as the extremely frothy housing market we're living in right now. But, inside this little 728 square foot house, you'll find a swinging, subtropical bachelor pad.
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.
Here's a rather pretty space, on the top floor of the Bank, a small condo tower near the corner of Biscayne Boulevard and NE 79th Street that, as the name suggests, used to be a bank. Listed for $750,000 and the biggest penthouse in the building, it was probably once a normal 1,600-foot apartment... you know, with bedrooms and stuff, but at some point converted into just one big room. It's a huge studio.
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.
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.
