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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Georgetown agent Jamie Peva blends history and real estate on Instagram, turning local stories into a powerful sales strategy.
5 min
On a recent morning in Georgetown—Washington, D.C.’s oldest neighborhood—real-estate agent Jamie Peva strode down leafy N Street, brimming with historical tidbits.
Jackie Kennedy once lived on the street, he said. So did Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Washington Post, along with a former Miss America and a powerful U.S. Senator. Bradlee’s widow, author Sally Quinn, and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, own stately homes there.
“I’ve seen a picture of Lyndon Johnson coming out of this house,” said Peva, passing a Federal-style brick mansion. “Also, the Beatles went to a lawn party here.”
Peva, a 60-year-old agent with Washington Fine Properties, has sold Georgetown real estate for over three decades, often traversing the neighborhood by bicycle. Of the roughly 2,500 houses in the historic neighborhood, he has been involved in the sale of 460, he estimated. A self-styled historian of the neighborhood, he knows stories behind its houses and their owners going back generations.
With a knack for lively storytelling, he shares his knowledge with some 37,500 Instagram followers, who have made Peva—sporting the bow ties he has worn since boarding school—an unlikely social-media influencer. Many of his followers are locals, and most have no plans to buy or sell real estate—until they do. It is then, according to Peva, that his spirited reels bring him to mind.
“It’s the digital version of a refrigerator magnet,” he said.
After Peva’s first video in November 2023, his eponymous Instagram account sparked a 10% increase in sales volume in the first year, and another 20% the next, he estimated. “It’s been very good for business, there is no question about it,” he said.
But Peva’s posts have also made him a local celebrity. As he walked down N street, the driver of a Mercedes station wagon slowed down to honk and wave. A lady walking a large dark gray dog stopped to ask what he was filming that day (a reel about a Colonial-era bottling plant.) Peva knew the dog from walking his two springers, Jumpy and Peggy-O, in the neighborhood.
“I need to make a video about the pooches of Georgetown,” he mused.
A growing number of real-estate agents now use social media to sell, and some have millions of followers with reels featuring ultraluxury pads, selling tips or reality TV-style reports on their daily lives. While Peva posts about his listings—and sometimes those of other agents—he mostly focuses on Georgetown history, local businesses and community events, saying his goal is to benefit both his business and the neighborhood.
“If we don’t find something genuinely interesting and worth sharing, we won’t do it,” said Peva’s daughter, Violet Peva, a New York social-media strategist who films, edits and posts his reels. “We cover many topics, not just real-estate information.”
Peva is originally from Connecticut, but has lived in Georgetown for over 30 years, currently in a cottage-style house with a white picket fence. Over the years, Georgetown has changed. The Georgetown Set, a powerful group of Cold War-era residents whose Sunday-night potluck dinners are said to have swayed U.S. policy, has long faded away. The community is still home to high-profile Washingtonians, including a Republican senator and several cabinet members. But it increasingly also attracts technology and finance executives, according to Peva. He now routinely signs nondisclosure agreements, ensuring privacy for wealthy clients. The shift has made him rethink his marketing approach.
“For years, a big part of our Georgetown business was made up of people who maintained a low profile,” he said. Real-estate agents were similarly low-key. Today, curb appeal is more important, he said, and agents are promoting themselves more. “As this change was underfoot, I was thinking that I needed to evolve myself too,” he said.
Though his own social-media use is mostly limited to following sailing accounts, he asked his daughter to help him post his listings online. Violet, now 26, started coming to D.C. once a month to film his reels. After an early video, on a condominium building called the Elliott, her sister Fern called her to report: “Daddy’s blowing up on Instagram,” Violet recalled. The reel got over 50,000 views. The next two each drew over 300,000. Peva’s most popular post ever, with over 838,000 views, was about the Grateful Dead playing in Georgetown. Sometimes, Peva interviews Georgetowners such as Quinn, the author, or Jamie Stachowski, the owner of a local butcher shop.
Peva, who majored in history in college, now spends up to two hours a day on research, usually in the morning while on his stationery bike. Online, he pores over old newspapers or the Library of Congress website, and he has a collection of articles and books—in and out of print—about Georgetown.
Companies often approach Peva for promotional posts, he said, but he turns them down, feeling that followers would lose interest in constant commercials. One exception is a recent paid post on Mount Vernon, the former home of George Washington. Peva wanted to share its history, he said, and didn’t want to lose the opportunity to another Instagrammer.
Anthony Arend, a professor at Georgetown University, has lived in his current home for 19 years without any plans to sell or buy real estate. But he follows Peva and often likes his posts.
“He is very charismatic, he is energetic, and he obviously knows a lot about the community,” said Arend, who has referred house-hunting friends to Peva.
One of Peva’s biggest deals—the $10.5 million sale of a 19th-century Italianate mansion—came after he made two 2024 reels featuring the property. In March, he sold the longtime O Street home of Tim and Jane Matz for $5.8 million after featuring it on his Instagram. Peva had showed them the home 25 years earlier, with Violet in a baby carrier on his back.
Last year, Kate Watts, 49, a digital consultant, called Peva to sell her late father’s three-bedroom house on Q Street; her husband had seen Peva on Instagram. In an October reel, Peva praised the architecture of the house, designed by modernist Hugh Newell Jacobsen. Halfway through, he mentioned an open house the next day, ending with an upbeat: “Did I also mention this house is for sale? $3.75 million!” The reel got 27,000 views, the open house was packed, and the buyers made an offer at the list price on the same day.
