Fourteen Years And A Demolition Later, Greg Norman Lists Jupiter Island Home For US$59.9 Million

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.

Greg Norman's Jupiter Island — Photo: Robert Stevens.

“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.

Many luxury hotels only build on their gilded reputations with each passing decade. But others are less fortunate. Here are five long-gone grandes dames that fell from grace—and one that persists, but in a significantly diminished form.

The Proto-Marmont |

The Garden of Allah, Los Angeles

A magnet for celebrities, the Garden of Allah was once the scene-making equivalent of today’s Chateau Marmont. Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner’s affair allegedly started there and Humphrey Bogart lived in one of its bungalows for a time.

Crimean expat Alla Nazimova leased a grand home in Hollywood after World War I, but soon turned it into a hotel, where she prioritised glamorous clientele. Others risked being ejected by guards and a fearsome dog dubbed the Hound of the Baskervilles. Demolished in the 1950s, the site’s now a parking lot.

The Failed Follow-Up |

Hotel Astor, New York City

The Astor family hoped to repeat their success when they opened this sequel to their megahit Waldorf Astoria hotel in 1904. It became an anchor of the nascent Theater District, buzzy (and naughty) enough to inspire Cole Porter to write in “High Society”: “Have you heard that Mimsie Starr…got pinched in the Astor Bar?”

That bar soon gained another reputation. “Gentlemen who preferred the company of other gentlemen would meet in a certain section of the bar,” said travel expert Henry Harteveldt of consulting firm Atmosphere Research. By the 1960s, the hotel had lost its lustre and was demolished; the 54-storey One Astor Plaza skyscraper was built in its place.

The Island Playground |

Santa Carolina Hotel, Bazaruto Archipelago, Mozambique

In the 1950s, colonial officers around Africa treated Mozambique as an off-duty playground. They flocked, in particular, to the Santa Carolina, a five-star hotel on a gorgeous archipelago off the country’s southern coast.

Run by a Portuguese businessman and his wife, the resort included an airstrip that ferried visitors in and out. Ask locals why the place was eventually reduced to rubble, and some whisper that the couple were cursed—and that’s why no one wanted to take over when the business collapsed in the ’70s. Today, seeing the abandoned, crumbled ruins and murals bleached by the sun, it’s hard to dismiss their superstitions entirely.

The Tourism Gimmick |

Bali Hai Raiatea, French Polynesia

The overwater bungalow, a shorthand for barefoot luxury around the world, began in French Polynesia—but not with the locals. Instead, it was a marketing gimmick cooked up by a trio of rascally Americans. They moved to French Polynesia in the late 1950s, and soon tried to capitalise on the newly built international airport and a looming tourism boom.

That proved difficult because their five-room hotel on the island of Raiatea lacked a beach. They devised a fix: building rooms on pontoons above the water. They were an instant phenomenon, spreading around the islands and the world—per fan site OverwaterBungalows.net , there are now more than 9,000 worldwide, from the Maldives to Mexico. That first property, though, is no more.

The New England Holdout |

Poland Springs Resort, Poland, Maine

The Ricker family started out as innkeepers, running a stagecoach stop in Maine in the 1790s. When Hiram Ricker took over the operation, the family expanded into the business by which it would make its fortune: water. Thanks to savvy marketing, by the 1870s, doctors were prescribing Poland Spring mineral water and die-hards were making pilgrimages to the source.

The Rickers opened the Poland Spring House in 1876, and eventually expanded it to include one of the earliest resort-based golf courses in the country, a barber shop, dance studio and music hall. By the turn of the century, it was among the most glamorous resort complexes in New England.

Mismanagement eventually forced its sale in 1962, and both the water operation and hospitality holdings went through several owners and operators. While the water venture retains its prominence, the hotel has weathered less well, becoming a pleasant—but far from luxurious—mid-market resort. Former NYU hospitality professor Bjorn Hanson says attempts at upgrading over the decades have been futile. “I was a consultant to a developer in the 1970s to return the resort to its ‘former glory,’ but it never happened.”