St. Edward’s grad Paul Fischman has been designing fabulous houses for a while, but the Miami architect’s career hit a new high when plans for a stunning 55,000-square-foot estate in Manalapan came on the market with an asking price of $285 million.
Located 12 miles south of The Breakers in Palm Beach and only a quarter mile from an ocean inlet, the project has the highest price tag of any home currently listed in the United States.
“This is the largest and most expensive residence we have designed,” said Fischman, one of three partners at Choeff Levy Fischman, a leader in the Tropical Modern style that has captivated Florida’s rapidly growing band of billionaire homebuyers.
Some of those buyers are already circling, according to Douglas Elliman listing agent Nick Malinosky.
“I have been amazed by the level of interest at that price point,” he told Vero Beach 32963 last week.
Developed by former Manalapan mayor Stewart Satter, who has done multiple projects in the town, the planned estate sits on 4 acres extending from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Worth Lagoon, with 350 feet of frontage on both waterfronts.
It includes a 41,500 main house and guest house on the lagoon side that encompass 8 bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, 5 half-baths, a steam room, sauna and spa, a 4-lane bowling alley, an indoor shooting range and a 6,800-square-foot, glass-walled car museum, all encased in the superb Tropical Modern architecture that is Fischman’s calling card.
There is also a beach house on the ocean side of the property, with a connecting tunnel under South Ocean Boulevard, which bisects the parcel.
The project is being marketed as land and plans, a method increasingly popular with $100-million-plus spec homes in South Florida.
“Before covid, we were doing 50 percent specs that we built and sold and 50 percent custom homes,” said Robert Burrage, owner of RWB Construction Management, the builder attached to the project.
“Now it is almost all custom homes, really, because the specs are selling before they come out of the ground, which allows us to modify the design to suit the buyer, saving them six or eight months of headaches and getting them in the house faster.”
That is what happened in 2022 at a Satter/Burrage project at 1260 S. Ocean Blvd., a mile north of the $285-million estate.
There, Satter bought a 1.5-acre ocean to lagoon lot for $15.5 million, commissioned plans and secured permits for a 27,500-square-foot home and listed the package for $125 million.
Shortly afterward, he sold the land and plans to Campbell Soup heiress billionaire Mary Alice Dorrance Malone for $40 million, who proceeded to have Burrage build a modified version of the planned house.
Burrage said he and Satter have worked together for 15 years, developing luxury homes in Palm Beach and Martin counties, where they have multiple $100-million projects underway at present.
Burrage has also worked with Fischman on prior ultra-luxury homes.
“Candidly, Stewart selected me not just to build the house but to put together the team,” Burrage said. “Once we decided to move ahead, Paul was the first person I thought of. My first phone call was to Choeff Levy Fischman.
“We think they bring the most value to the project. They have an edgy, contemporary style that is fresh, dramatic and in demand. It’s what billionaires moving to Florida want and we know they will do it right.”
“I had met Satter over the years and we had been trying to work together,” Fischman said. “When he saw a chance to shake up the market in Manalapan, he and Robert wanted us to be part of it.
“At this point, Choeff Levy Fischman is synonymous with record-breaking sales, and they wanted to tap our style and reputation.
“I took my body of work and my 23 years of listening to what our clients want and designed the project as if all those clients and customers over the years were a single composite person.
“Satter and Robert had a few fundamentals they wanted, such as the number of bedrooms and the car museum, but other than that, they gave me free reign and I threw the dream program on the design, making it the ideal of what these kinds of buyers want.”
Fischman said it took him, two CLF senior project managers and a project designer about three months to create the design.
Despite that long, painstaking, highly technical creative process, Fischman isn’t married to every detail or even every major component of the design. After more than two decades in his profession, steel, glass, stone, wood – and space – are easily malleable in his mind.
“Any time you build a house like this, there are constant changes due to the materials, technology and the buyers, so it is no problem to reshape the vision to suit whoever purchases this project,” he said.
“I was on a OAC [owner, architect, builder] call last week for one of our projects where we made 20 design changes in an hour. It’s part of the process when you are building at this level for these kinds of clients.”
And the clients keep coming.
Fischman, Burrage and Malinosky all say the influx of super-wealthy buyers into Florida that began during the pandemic is gaining momentum.
“The volume of wealth that has poured in the past five years is hard to comprehend,” said Burrage. “We are basically building for billionaires now, which is a huge change from five years ago. It was always wealthy people, but nothing like we are seeing now.”
“Hundred-million-dollar properties are becoming normal,” said Malinosky, who handled the sale of Satter’s 1260 S. Ocean project in 2022.
Fischman said there are two main types of big buyers.
“Palm Beach attracts more conservative, generational wealth, including a lot of the high-end equestrian crowd. You may get a Rockefeller or a Kennedy, people who are not flashy, while Miami pulls more high-profile types who are in the news, people with cultural cache as well as financial means.
“Miami has become the new Monaco, Silicon Valley and New York City rolled into one in the past few years,” said Fischman, a snowballing process that has developed symbiotically as the uber-rich and famous arrive in private jets, build trophy homes and attract more people from the upper echelons of finance and culture in their wake.
Jeff Bezos, the second-richest man in world, hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffen, soccer star Lionel Messi, David Beckham and real estate superstar Fredrick Ecklund are among those who have arrived in South Florida since Covid-19 upended the world.
Wealth builds on itself in multiple ways, pushing real estate prices higher.
When Bezos splurges $235 million on lots on Indian Creek Island in Miami as he has in the past several years, adjacent lots become much more valuable.
According to Page Six, soccer legend Beckham paid $25 million to start Inter Miami CF, where Messi now plays. It became a major league soccer franchise in 2020 and is now worth over $1 billion, making the hard-charging city richer and more exciting for sports fans and people draw to urban action and celebrity vibes.
Following on, Beckham and his wife Victoria bought a $72-million house on the water in Miami Beach last year, paying more than $5,000 a square foot for the Choeff Levy Fischman-designed home, where they park their 130-foot Bellissima yacht.
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison – the fourth richest person in the world, according to Bankrate – juiced the market in Manalapan when he showed up in 2022, paying $173 million for the estate next to Satter’s $285-million project.
Last year, he added Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa to his Manalapan holdings, spending $277 million for the town’s only hotel, where rooms start at $1,000 a night and suites go for over $3,000 a night in season, pouring money into upgrading the resort, which doubles as a club for town residents.
Meanwhile, across the lagoon, real estate billionaire Stephen Ross, founder of Related Companies and owner of the Miami Dolphins, is in the midst of spending $10 billion to upgrade the city of West Palm Beach into a national tech and luxury center, according to the Wall Street Journal, pouring $500 million into a university campus, pushing a $600-million hospital plan, and developing lots of retail and office space and luxury condos that are setting new benchmarks for value.
After a while, it all starts to add up, with a more spectacular built environment, larger numbers of interesting and influential people and increased business and cultural activity creating a magnetic force that draws more of the same.
The architects, builders, developers and real estate brokers in the thick of the $100-million-plus market are evolving, too, acquiring ever more elite skill sets that allow them to meet buyer expectations that are escalating along with values.
Malinosky said Palm Beach and Manalapan have become an epicenter of the trend in part because of the availability of large pieces of oceanfront property, such as Satter’s 4-acre parcel.
“These buyers are attracted by big lots where they can build trophy properties with private, secure compounds close to everything South Florida has to offer,” he said.
Satter told the Palm Beach Daily News that the Fischman design in Manalapan will cost $150 million to build, and Burrage confirmed the expected cost.
Even if the project sells for less than asking, it may well set a new record in Manalapan and Palm Beach, surpassing Ellison’s $173-million purchase and egging Satter or another top developer to push the envelope further.
“Once one guy moves the dial a few notches, the next guy has to move it a few more,” said Burrage, adding that the 55,000-square-foot Paul Fischman design is not the largest homebuilding project he has in the works. “It has become almost a competition.”
Fischman said he sees the sizzling $100-million-and-up market spreading outward from Miami and Palm Beach, edging as far north as Hobe Sound in Martin County – which can’t hurt the real estate market in 32963, where waterfront land is still way cheaper than to the south and helicopters can land.
Photos provided
