Inside a Florida car condo, which includes a ground floor area that can hold five of the owner’s 20 cars at a time
2 min
Suzanne Lovell, a Chicago-based designer, had already worked with her clients—who are in their late 50s and work in the boating industry—on a condo in Chicago and a 15,000-square-foot penthouse in Naples, Fla., when the husband called with a special request. “He had just purchased a car condo about 5 miles from their Naples residence,” Lovell says. “And he asked me to design the coolest man cave ever.”
The car condo is in a gated community, but instead of front doors, there are garage doors. The units don’t have bedrooms. Instead, there is generous space for cars and for entertaining—complete with bathrooms and wet bars—making a car condo the perfect place to host a Formula One viewing party. The double unit, which the couple bought in 2021 and would cost about $3 million in today’s market, is about 3,400 square feet. The second-floor entertaining space overlooks the ground floor, which has space for five of the owner’s 20 cars, including a 1957 Porsche Speedster, a 1962 Ferrari 250GT and a 1961 Facel Vega. Along with multiple seating areas, the entertainment floor also has a race simulator and a room for the owner’s custom slot car track. The couple spent about $1.2 million to outfit the space. Cars not included!
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A five-bedroom Palo Alto home designed by Steven Ehrlich is listed for $44 million, making it the city’s most expensive listing. Built around a dramatic concrete spine, the home features four courtyards and a pool.
3 min
For years, tech entrepreneur Asher Waldfogel and his wife, Helyn MacLean, dreamed of building a modern house in Palo Alto, Calif.
The couple, however, worried about clashing with the Mediterranean-style architecture typically associated with their neighborhood of Old Palo Alto.
So they tapped architect Steven Ehrlich to create a design that paid homage to its surroundings with stucco, mahogany and titanium zinc cladding. They spent $20 million over several years building the house, completed in 2005.
Now looking to be closer to their adult daughter on the East Coast, they are putting the five-bedroom home on the market for $44 million—the most expensive listing in Palo Alto.
Waldfogel is an angel investor who co-founded Redback Networks, a telecommunications-equipment company. MacLean previously had a career in fundraising.
The couple purchased the roughly 0.4-acre site for $7.1 million in 2000 and demolished a circa-1930s Spanish Colonial home. The house they built pinwheels around a central staircase. It has 7,900 square feet of livable space, with four distinct courtyards and a pool.
A key feature of the home is a cast-in-place concrete wall, or spine, that is two stories high and about 80 feet long. “There’s a little bit of controlled chaos in what comes out of the form,” unlike a perfectly uniform surface, Waldfogel said. “If you want that, you do it in plastic.”
Waldfogel said he and his wife are thinking about the next phase of life now that their daughter is grown, although they have not decided where they will move. They also have a home in Sun Valley, Idaho.
“Right now we’re just trying to emotionally let go and decide what to do next,” he said.
Palo Alto, an epicenter of venture capital and tech startups in Silicon Valley, is home to some of the country’s biggest tech titans. Sales volume and prices are rising, with a median sale price of $3.5 million for the three months ending in August, up 5.8% year-over-year, according to real-estate brokerage Redfin.
Arthur Sharif of Sotheby’s International Realty—San Francisco Brokerage has the listing.
