Back in January, businesswoman/philanthropist Adrienne Arsht listed her 4-acre, two-home Miami estate overlooking Biscayne Bay for an eye-popping $150 million. Over the weekend it was confirmed that she finally found a buyer. There's some bad news and some good news for Adrienne. On the downside, she had to accept a $43 million discount.
$43 million!
On the upside, the $106.875 million Adrienne accepted is absolutely smashes the residential record for Miami-Dade county. Oh, and Adrienne is donating all of the proceeds from the sale to charity!
Before I even get into the background and details, just go ahead and take a video tour of the estate:
Who is Adrienne Arsht?
An extremely interesting person!
She was born in 1942. Both of her parents were lawyers. Her mother Roxana Cannon Arsht was the first female judge in Delaware state history.
Adrienne skipped her senior year of high school to go straight to college at Mount Holyoke. She then earned a J.D. from Villanova University Law School.
Amazingly, even by the mid-1960s only a handful of women had ever been admitted to the Delaware bar. Adrianne was just the 18th woman to be admitted. Decades earlier, her mother was #5.
In 1969 Adrienne joined the legal department of Trans World Airlines in New York City. A decade later she moved to DC with her husband who was a lawyer for two Presidents. While in DC, in addition to practicing law, she also started a title business on the side.
In 1996 Adrienne and her husband moved to Miami so she could take the reigns of a bank that was owned by members of her extended family. That bank was called TotalBank.
When Adrienne took over TotalBank in 1996, the bank had four locations and roughly $100 million in assets. She grew the business to 14 locations with $1.4 billion in assets. In November 2007 Adrienne orchestrated a deal to sell TotalBank to Banco Popular Espanol for $300 million.
In the years since the sale of TotalBank Adrienne has pivoted to philanthropy. She has donated tens of millions of dollars to charities around the United States and, as we mentioned previously, plans to donate 100% of her home sale proceeds to charity as well.
Miami Mansion
Adrienne bought the first of what became these two waterfront parcels that just sold in the 1990 for $4 million. On that lot she built an estate she called Indian Spring. For many years her next door neighbor was Madonna.
In 2007, Adrienne paid $12 million for the property next door. That property, which is called Villa Serena, was originally built in 1913 William Jennings Bryan. Bryan famously ran three unsuccessful campaigns for President and argued AGAINST Darwin's theory of evolution at the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial.
Combined, the two properties span four acres and have 25,000 square-feet of living space. The combined mansions sit on 400 feet of ocean frontage.
Adrienne spent four years restoring Villa Serena, which had previously been owned by a pair of sisters who filled the Villa with dozens of rescued feral cats 🙂
Buyer's Identity Revealed!
In the days after this article was first published the identity of the buyer was revealed. And we probably could have guessed. According to a number of reliable reports, billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin is the buyer who has plunked down $107 million. Why shouldn't that be surprising? Because in the last few years, Ken has spent nearly $1 billion on personal homes. He owns the record for most expensive home ever bought in Illinois ($58 million) and most expensive home in US history ($238 million NYC four-floor apartment). He already owns $200 million worth of land in Palm Beach, Florida. You can do all of this when your net worth is $28 billion
