One of the last remaining estates facing Biscayne Bay in Coconut Grove has been sold for $2.35 million.
The buyers were James Gray, president of the Burdines retail stores, and his wife, Sheila.
The Grays had been house-hunting since they sold their their Brickell Avenue mansion last year to pop star Madonna for $4.9 million, the second-highest price ever paid for a single-family home in Dade County.
That 6.9-acre estate at 3551 Main Highway, known as Casablanca, has more than 200 feet fronting Biscayne Bay.
Casablanca, a Spanish Revival-style mansion built in 1921, was designed by architect Richard Kiehnel of Pittsburgh, who also designed the Carrollton School and Miami High School.
The house was built by Pittsburgh lawyer John Semple as his winter home.
Real estate sources said the Grays were eager to find another Spanish Revival-style home similar to the one they sold to Madonna. But there are few original waterfront mansions remaining in Miami. The Grays were unavailable for comment.
Miami architect Jose Gelabert Navia, who was familiar with Kiehnel’s work, introduced the Grays to the house they eventually bought. “The house is probably the closest thing to the house they sold, but the property is bigger,” he said.
Gelabert believes that the Grays intend to restore the mansion and grounds, which were torn up by Hurricane Andrew. Before the storm, lush foliage shielded the house from the roadway and partly obscured its spectacular view of the bay. The Grays bought the estate from Coconut Grove Bank. The bank took over the property in lieu of foreclosure from Julia Field, who was the superintendent of the Crandon Park Zoo during the 1950s.
The estate has been on the market more than four years, according to several brokers. At one point, Field was asking about $6 million for it, brokers recalled. The property’s hefty tax bill-$95,027 in 1993-also deterred some potential buyers, they said.
In the past two years, several developers have considered buying the site because it’s zoned for about a dozen luxury homes, said Edie Laquer of Tecton Inc. Laquer and Peter Andolina, also at Tecton, handled the sale for the bank.
But the county has a moratorium on building; that means a developer wouldn’t have been able to build because he couldn’t get a hook-up to the city’s water and sewer system.
“We all lucked out on finding a user, not a developer,” Laquer said.
