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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What a quarter-million dollars gets you in the western capital.
Alexandre de Betak and his wife are focusing on their most personal project yet.
Ahead of the Games, a breakdown of the city’s most desirable places to live
7 min
PARIS —Paris has long been a byword for luxurious living. The traditional components of the upscale home, from parquet floors to elaborate mouldings, have their origins here. Yet settling down in just the right address in this low-rise, high-density city may be the greatest luxury of all.
Tradition reigns supreme in Paris real estate, where certain conditions seem set in stone—the western half of the city, on either side of the Seine, has long been more expensive than the east. But in the fashion world’s capital, parts of the housing market are also subject to shifting fads. In the trendy, hilly northeast, a roving cool factor can send prices in this year’s hip neighbourhood rising, while last year’s might seem like a sudden bargain.
This week, with the opening of the Olympic Games and the eyes of the world turned toward Paris, The Wall Street Journal looks at the most expensive and desirable areas in the City of Light.
Known for historic architecture, elegant apartment houses and bohemian street cred, the 6th Arrondissement is Paris’s answer to Manhattan’s West Village. Like its New York counterpart, the 6th’s starving-artist days are long behind it. But the charm that first wooed notable residents like Gertrude Stein and Jean-Paul Sartre is still largely intact, attracting high-minded tourists and deep-pocketed homeowners who can afford its once-edgy, now serene atmosphere.
Le Breton George V Notaires, a Paris notary with an international clientele, says the 6th consistently holds the title of most expensive arrondissement among Paris’s 20 administrative districts, and 2023 was no exception. Last year, average home prices reached $1,428 a square foot—almost 30% higher than the Paris average of $1,100 a square foot.
According to Meilleurs Agents, the Paris real estate appraisal company, the 6th is also home to three of the city’s five most expensive streets. Rue de Furstemberg, a secluded loop between Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Seine, comes in on top, with average prices of $2,454 a square foot as of March 2024.
For more than two decades, Kyle Branum, a 51-year-old attorney, and Kimberly Branum, a 60-year-old retired CEO, have been regular visitors to Paris, opting for apartment rentals and ultimately an ownership interest in an apartment in the city’s 7th Arrondissement, a sedate Left Bank district known for its discreet atmosphere and plutocratic residents.
“The 7th was the only place we stayed,” says Kimberly, “but we spent most of our time in the 6th.”
In 2022, inspired by the strength of the dollar, the Branums decided to fulfil a longstanding dream of buying in Paris. Working with Paris Property Group, they opted for a 1,465-square-foot, three-bedroom in a building dating to the 17th century on a side street in the 6th Arrondissement. They paid $2.7 million for the unit and then spent just over $1 million on the renovation, working with Franco-American visual artist Monte Laster, who also does interiors.
The couple, who live in Santa Barbara, Calif., plan to spend about three months a year in Paris, hosting children and grandchildren, and cooking after forays to local food markets. Their new kitchen, which includes a French stove from luxury appliance brand Lacanche, is Kimberly’s favourite room, she says.
Another American, investor Ashley Maddox, 49, is also considering relocating.
In 2012, the longtime Paris resident bought a dingy, overstuffed 1,765-square-foot apartment in the 6th and started from scratch. She paid $2.5 million and undertook a gut renovation and building improvements for about $800,000. A centrepiece of the home now is the one-time salon, which was turned into an open-plan kitchen and dining area where Maddox and her three children tend to hang out, American-style. Just outside her door are some of the city’s best-known bakeries and cheesemongers, and she is a short walk from the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Left Bank’s premier green space.
“A lot of the majesty of the city is accessible from here,” she says. “It’s so central, it’s bananas.” Now that two of her children are going away to school, she has listed the four-bedroom apartment with Varenne for $5 million.
Garrow Kedigian is moving up in the world of Parisian real estate by heading south of the Seine.
During the pandemic, the Canada-born, New York-based interior designer reassessed his life, he says, and decided “I’m not going to wait any longer to have a pied-à-terre in Paris.”
He originally selected a 1,130-square-foot one-bedroom in the trendy 9th Arrondissement, an up-and-coming Right Bank district just below Montmartre. But he soon realised it was too small for his extended stays, not to mention hosting guests from out of town.
After paying about $1.6 million in 2022 and then investing about $55,000 in new decor, he put the unit up for sale in early 2024 and went house-shopping a second time. He ended up in the Invalides quarter of the 7th Arrondissement in the shadow of one Paris’s signature monuments, the golden-domed Hôtel des Invalides, which dates to the 17th century and is fronted by a grand esplanade.
His new neighbourhood vies for Paris’s most expensive with the Notre-Dame quarter in the 4th Arrondissement, centred on a few islands in the Seine behind its namesake cathedral. According to Le Breton, home prices in the Notre-Dame neighbourhood were $1,818 a square foot in 2023, followed by $1,568 a square foot in Invalides.
After breaking even on his Right Bank one-bedroom, Kedigian paid $2.4 million for his new 1,450-square-foot two-bedroom in a late 19th-century building. It has southern exposures, rounded living-room windows and “gorgeous floors,” he says. Kedigian, who bought the new flat through Junot Fine Properties/Knight Frank, plans to spend up to $435,000 on a renovation that will involve restoring the original 12-foot ceiling height in many of the rooms, as well as rescuing the ceilings’ elaborate stucco detailing. He expects to finish in 2025.
Over in the Notre-Dame neighbourhood, Belles demeures de France/Christie’s recently sold a 2,370-square-foot, four-bedroom home for close to the asking price of about $8.6 million, or about $3,630 a square foot. Listing agent Marie-Hélène Lundgreen says this places the unit near the very top of Paris luxury real estate, where prime homes typically sell between $2,530 and $4,040 a square foot.
The Boulevard Périphérique, the 22-mile ring road that surrounds Paris and its 20 arrondissements, was once a line in the sand for Parisians, who regarded the French capital’s numerous suburbs as something to drive through on their way to and from vacation. The past few decades have seen waves of gentrification beyond the city’s borders, upgrading humble or industrial districts to the north and east into prime residential areas. And it has turned Neuilly-sur-Seine, just northwest of the city, into a luxury compound of first resort.
In 2023, Neuilly’s average home price of $1,092 a square foot made the leafy, stately community Paris’s most expensive suburb.
Longtime residents, Alain and Michèle Bigio, decided this year is the right time to list their 7,730-square-foot, four-bedroom townhouse on a gated Neuilly street.
The couple, now in their mid 70s, completed the home in 1990, two years after they purchased a small parcel of garden from the owners next door for an undisclosed amount. Having relocated from a white-marble château outside Paris, the couple echoed their previous home by using white- and cream-coloured stone in the new four-story build. The Bigios, who will relocate just back over the border in the 16th Arrondissement, have listed the property with Emile Garcin Propriétés for $14.7 million.
The couple raised two adult children here and undertook upgrades in their empty-nester years—most recently, an indoor pool in the basement and a new elevator.
The cool, pale interiors give way to dark and sardonic images in the former staff’s quarters in the basement where Alain works on his hobby—surreal and satirical paintings, whose risqué content means that his wife prefers they stay downstairs. “I’m not a painter,” he says. “But I paint.”
French interior designer Julie Hamon is theatre royalty. Her grandfather was playwright Jean Anouilh, a giant of 20th-century French literature, and her sister is actress Gwendoline Hamon. The 52-year-old, who divides her time between Paris and the U.K., still remembers when the city’s 9th Arrondissement, where she and her husband bought their 1,885-square-foot duplex in 2017, was a place to have fun rather than put down roots. Now, the 9th is the place to do both.
The 9th, a largely 19th-century district, is Paris at its most urban. But what it lacks in parks and other green spaces, it makes up with nightlife and a bustling street life. Among Paris’s gentrifying districts, which have been transformed since 2000 from near-slums to the brink of luxury, the 9th has emerged as the clear winner. According to Le Breton, average 2023 home prices here were $1,062 a square foot, while its nearest competitors for the cool crown, the 10th and the 11th, have yet to break $1,011 a square foot.
A co-principal in the Bobo Design Studio, Hamon—whose gut renovation includes a dramatic skylight, a home cinema and air conditioning—still seems surprised at how far her arrondissement has come. “The 9th used to be well known for all the theatres, nightclubs and strip clubs,” she says. “But it was never a place where you wanted to live—now it’s the place to be.”
With their youngest child about to go to college, she and her husband, 52-year-old entrepreneur Guillaume Clignet, decided to list their Paris home for $3.45 million and live in London full-time. Propriétés Parisiennes/Sotheby’s is handling the listing, which has just gone into contract after about six months on the market.
The 9th’s music venues were a draw for 44-year-old American musician and piano dealer, Ronen Segev, who divides his time between Miami and a 1,725-square-foot, two-bedroom in the lower reaches of the arrondissement. Aided by Paris Property Group, Segev purchased the apartment at auction during the pandemic, sight unseen, for $1.69 million. He spent $270,000 on a renovation, knocking down a wall to make a larger salon suitable for home concerts.
During the Olympics, Segev is renting out the space for about $22,850 a week to attendees of the Games. Otherwise, he prefers longer-term sublets to visiting musicians for $32,700 a month.
Hidden in the hilly expanses of the 18th Arrondissement lies a legendary street that, for those in the know, is the city’s most exclusive address. Avenue Junot, a bucolic tree-lined lane, is a fairy-tale version of the city, separate from the gritty bustle that surrounds it.
Homes here rarely come up for sale, and, when they do, they tend to be off-market, or sold before they can be listed. Martine Kuperfis—whose Paris-based Junot Group real-estate company is named for the street—says the most expensive units here are penthouses with views over the whole of the city.
In 2021, her agency sold a 3,230-square-foot triplex apartment, with a 1,400-square-foot terrace, for $8.5 million. At about $2,630 a square foot, that is three times the current average price in the whole of the 18th.
Among its current Junot listings is a 1930s 1,220-square-foot townhouse on the avenue’s cobblestone extension, with an asking price of $2.8 million.
