PALM BEACH LANDMARK SELLS FOR $18 MILLION
PALM BEACH — A landmarked Palm Beach house on the street that connects South County Road to Everglades Island has changed hands for more than $17 million.
The house, at 330 Island Road, was rebuilt by the seller and the transaction marks only its third sale since it was built nearly 80 years ago. The sale recorded today at $17.68 million.
A limited liability company linked to real estate investors Arthur F. Minerof and Lawrence Genco sold the red-brick house, according to preliminary information about the sale posted on the Palm Beach County Clerk’s website. The deed lists the seller as Milan E.A.T. LLC.
A trust was on the buyer’s side, with Palm Beach attorney Robert G. Simses serving as trustee. Simses declined to comment, and no other information about the 330 Island Road Trust was immediately available.
The two-story house stands on a half-acre lot with about 126 feet of waterfront. The rear of the house looks southward across a lagoon that opens to the Intracoastal Waterway. On the north side, doors and windows overlook the Everglades Golf Course. The house has six bedrooms and 9,795 square feet of living space, inside and out, according to property records.
With two fireplaces and an elevator, the house had been listed for sale since November 2015, initially priced at $27.5 million but ultimately reduced to $19.99 million. Corcoran Group agents Paulette Koch and Dana Koch had the listing.
Sotheby’s International Realty agents Christine Gibbons and Lisa Cregan handled the buyer’s side of the deal, according to the updated sales listing in the Palm Beach Board of Realtors Multiple Listing Service.
The house was designed in 1939 by the firm of noted society architect Maurice Fatio for the late Standard Oil scion and conservationist Frances Archbold Hufty and her late husband, Mann Randolph Page Hufty. It was owned by the Hufty family until Frances Hufty’s estate sold it in 2011 to Milan E.A.T. LLC, for $6.9 million. She was the granddaughter of John Archbold, one of the founders of Standard Oil. She died in November 2010 at 98.
In early 2012, the house was designated a town landmark, which protects the look of its exterior from significant alterations. Milan E.A.T. voluntarily submitted the property for landmarking, town records show. Records also show the company participated in a program that provides a 10-year property-tax exemption for qualifying improvements to landmarked structures. That exemption transferred with the sale.
Palm Beach architect Gene Pandula oversaw the renovation and restoration project, which kept the house’s footprint intact. Completed in 2015, the complex project involved rebuilding the house brick by brick — using original bricks augmented by replacements — and raising the foundation to meet flood-plain regulations.
“This was probably one of the two or three most technically challenging projects we’ve ever done,” Pandula said this week.
The renovation also enclosed an open-air pavilion to serve as a loggia and cabana. A new dining area also replaced a 1955 dining addition designed by society architect John L. Volk, and the second-floor layout was revised to turn bedrooms into suites.
Pandula noted that keeping the streetside appearance of the house intact was “important to the integrity of Island Road and the architecture of the street.”