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.
Copyright 2020, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. LEARN MORE
The Australian leather house has opened an immersive four-day pop-up in Manhattan, unveiling its Bloom Collection and redefining what a product launch can look like.
Following the successful launch of its Palais Collection, MAISON de SABRÉ has unveiled a new modular handbag system offering more than 720 styling combinations.
The imposing stone structures, with towers, turrets and a hot tub room, lord over the landscape near the mountain resort town of Sandpoint.
2 min
Idaho is not a place that’s often associated with Medieval castles, but a pair have just hit the market for $6.25 million.
The imposing stone structures have towers, turrets, ramparts, arrow-slit windows and even a drawbridge, and might just be the most authentic-looking castles this side of the Atlantic.
“Who expects to see a castle like this in Idaho?” said listing agent Brenda Burk of Coldwell Banker Schneidmiller Realty, who brought the property to the market last week. They are, she said, “extremely unusual.”
Schweitzer Castle and Château de Melusine, as they’re known, stand within Schweitzer Mountain Resort in the Selkirk Mountains and overlook the nearby mountain resort town of Sandpoint. They take in panoramic views of Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho’s largest lake.
The pair of ski-in/ski-out homes each have three bedrooms, two bathrooms and three stories, Burk explained. They are “so authentic,” she said. “Every single stone was handlaid.”
Schweitzer Castle, she said, wasn’t built for “functionality,” but has been modernized and adapted and now has everything a 21st-century residence requires, along with a dungeon, which for some buyers may also be a requisite.
The chateau, meanwhile, has a hot tub room with mountain views, as well as a garage.
The property is being sold furnished, and will come complete with the hand-carved statues, armor, mounted swords, stained-glass windows and a host of antiques dating to the 15th and 16th centuries.
The owner, an antique collector who couldn’t be reached for comment, “is always looking for that hidden jewel and he found that here,” Burk said.
The next custodian is likely to stem from a varied pool of buyers, Burk said, that would include “the trophy-home buyer, someone who can say ‘I own a castle.’”
The property could also appeal to someone looking for a vacation home, or a multi-generational estate, and beyond that “there’s the dreamers,” she said. “We definitely try to market to people who like Medieval history or maybe do Renaissance fairs.”
The seller “really wants it to go to someone with the same passion.”
