After years of trying to sell the Florida property, the golf legend bulldozed the original home and built a 2970sqm compound in its place
4 min
Over a period of 14 years, golf legend Greg Norman has listed his home, reduced the price of his home, demolished his home and then replaced it with a large family compound filled with every bell and whistle he could think of.
Now he and his wife Kiki Norman have decided to sell, and are listing the customized compound for $59.9 million.
Named Tranquility, the 10-bedroom estate is over 8 acres and has nearly 2970sqm of living space, including the main house, a carriage house, a pool house, a guesthouse and a boathouse, according to the listing.
The home, completed last summer, has sprawling entertainment spaces, a bar, a trophy room and gallery, a large family room, an outdoor terrace, two offices, a luggage room and even a room for accessories like handbags, scarves and costume jewellery. There is also a more than 465sqm basement entertainment suite with a game room, a movie theatre and two 1900-bottle wine cellars.
“We’re on an island with hundreds of coconut trees, so it was very natural to build a coastal tropical beach house,” said Ms Norman, 52. “My goal was to make the house feel like we were on permanent vacation.”
Many of the home’s interior-design details were inspired by yachts, Ms Norman said, including a pair of navy banquettes in the kitchen custom designed to accommodate all the couple’s grandchildren. She said she also drew inspiration from the couple’s travels to places like St. Barts, the Bahamas, Jamaica and Australia, resulting in the incorporation of lacquered teak and high-gloss mahogany into the finishes.
The property is geared to the couple’s outdoor lifestyle, with a tennis pavilion and a gym. The construction of a pool house with an open terrace and two pools turned out to be a bonus amid the Covid-19 lockdowns.
“With it being open air, the pool house was the only real safe place to have a meal with a few friends or family that we trusted,” Ms Norman said. The boathouse is also used to accommodate Jet Skis, fishing rods and yacht equipment, and there is dockage for a yacht of roughly 150 feet.
The decision to sell the new home caps Mr Norman’s three decades on the island, which has since become one of the nation’s golf meccas. The area is home to several high-profile courses and training facilities. By 2016, The Wall Street Journal estimated that there were nearly 30 players on the PGA Tour residing in the area, including Tiger Woods and Dustin Johnson.
Mr Norman, 65, arrived in Jupiter in 1991, when he was introduced to the lush Florida island by golfer Jack Nicklaus, who lived in the area. Mr Norman was immediately drawn to the area’s laid-back lifestyle, which reminded him of his native Australia, and signed a contract for the house the same day he saw it.
“This gave me a compound where I could create my own private practice world,” Mr Norman said. “I had my own tee box and bunker and putting green. I would come home and people would think I wasn’t practising, but I’d be home practising and getting my game ready for the next week.”
For most of their years there, the Normans lived in a shingled cottage built-in 1902. It had its quirks. Some of the doorways were just 6 feet and 2 inches tall, and the staircase balustrade was just 30 inches high. “It didn’t have any insulation, not in the attic, not in the walls,” he said of the house. “As a matter of fact, it didn’t even have a foundation. It was basically buried into the sand dunes, and there wasn’t any hard foundation underneath.”
Mr Norman put that property on the market in 2007 for US$65 million but said he was just testing the market. It went on and off the market for roughly a decade and he and Ms Norman dropped the price to US$55 million in 2016. Still no buyers.
“I had a lot of people who came to take a look at it. A lot of my wealthy friends came,” said Mr Norman, noting that most of them concluded the house required too much work. “People wanted to have a turnkey property,” he said.
They decided to keep the property and upgrade it instead. Among the motivating factors was that the couple had a short window to take advantage of a permit they had to expand the property. The provision was sunsetting and wouldn’t be passed on to a new owner.
So three years ago, the couple tore down the existing house. “There one minute gone the next,” Mr Norman tweeted, as he watched a giant excavator tear down his home of close to two decades. Ms Norman snapped a photo as he stood in the giant hole left in the ground and pretended to play a bunker shot.
The Normans said they didn’t expect to be putting the finished product on the market so soon, but the Covid crisis made them re-evaluate their priorities. They want to travel more, they said, and spend more time in Australia with Mr Norman’s family. The couple also recently won their own battles with Covid-19. “This virus kicked the crap out of me like nothing I have ever experienced before,” Mr Norman wrote on Instagram. The couple has since fully recovered.
In addition to listing Tranquility, Mr Norman also recently made a deal to sell his ranch in Colorado, which had been on the market for $40 million, though it has not yet closed, he said.
Jill Hertzberg of the Jills Zeder Group and Michelle Thomson of the Thomson Team at Coldwell Banker Realty have the Florida listing.
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Kit Braden, an executive at French beauty empire L’Occitane, has spent every winter for the past 13 years at the stone vacation home.
2 min
A historic Barbados estate with a 300-year-old villa and 11 acres overlooking the Caribbean Sea is now for sale with a guide price of $22.5 million.
The seller is Kit Braden, chairman of the U.K. branch of French beauty empire L’Occitane Group, whose family has spent every winter for the last 13 years at the island property, known as Fustic Estate.
“It’s very much a family house,” Braden said. “We love having a lot of people there. It’s a collection point to keep everyone together.”
The main villa dates to 1712, though it’s been reimagined and expanded substantially over the years.
It spans 13,000 square feet and features seven en suite bedrooms across three wings, as well as expansive verandas, stone courtyards and rows of louvered doors in gay Caribbean pastels.
In the 1970s, when the home was owned by Charles Graves—brother of British poet Robert Graves—it was reimagined by stage designer Oliver Messel, one of the foremost theater designers of the last century. Messel expanded the home, added a lagoon pool with a natural waterfall and other theatrical features, according to Braden.
“The whole place is a little bit magical,” he said.
The home sits about 350 feet above the water, and surrounded by lush gardens that slope towards the water.
“We look down through our garden—which is about 12 acres of tropical gardens and palm trees and wonderful old mahogany trees—onto the Caribbean,” Braden said.
He and his wife first saw the property on New Year’s Eve 2013, during a quick trip from where they were staying in Grenada.
The couple spent an hour walking the perimeter, some of it still untouched jungle, in the pouring rain.
“By the time we got back, I had fallen in love with it,” Braden said.
His wife, however, wasn’t so sure. But in Braden’s telling, a second visit in sunnier weather with two of their children brought her around.
“She had to be talked into that it was a jolly good idea; now she absolutely loves it,” he said.
When they bought the property, the edge that runs along the waterfront was a jungle, so they cleared the ridge and transformed it into gardens.
They also bought an additional sea-level parcel with two beach cottages, giving the property direct access to the water and the town below via a five-minute walk.
The property also has a 15-person staff, a reflecting pond, an outdoor pavilion suitable for yoga and a commercial grade kitchen that can serve more than 100 guests, according to a brochure from Knight Frank, which posted the listing in March. They did not provide further comment.
For Braden, the property is special because of its natural beauty, its proximity to the town of Saint Lucy and its history—which dates way way back to when the island of Barbados was first formed via tectonic activity.
“It was basically tectonic plates that collided about a million years ago so the seabed is the top of the hill,” Braden said. “We’re on coral rock.”
As a result, Fustic Estate includes an extensive network of caves that were likely used by the Arawaks, a Venezuelan fishing tribe that followed the fish to these islands about a thousand years ago.
“If the fish were good they’d camp here,” Braden said. “There’s evidence that they stayed there in those caves, they lived there in good winters.”
Now it’s someone else’s turn to live on the land shared by Arawaks, the plantation owners of 1712, Charles Graves and the Braden brood.
