Tom Ford's new mansion in Palm Beach (Florida), seen from the air.
Among the fifteen tips for the good modern man that he gave to
Vogue UK a few years ago
, and which have been around the internet ever since as a style brief, Tom Ford recommended throwing away socks and underwear every six months.
The idolized Texan designer shows ease with real estate equivalent to the one he manages with underpants.
In recent years, he has gotten rid of his Victorian house in London's Chelsea neighborhood, and architectural jewels such as the ranch in Santa Fe that he commissioned from Pritzker Prize winner Tadao Ando in the 2000s, or the iconic 1950s house designed by Richard Neutra in Bel Air.
In exchange, he has just bought an exclusive winter refuge in Florida, which adds to other luxurious properties such as a majestic villa in Los Angeles or an emblematic house in Manhattan, which formerly belonged to designer Roy Halston.
In the middle of last November, Estée Lauder announced the purchase of Tom Ford for 2,800 million dollars.
A few weeks later, at the edge of Christmas, the sale of a luxurious residence in Palm Beach, 4,000 meters of plot and nearly 1,000 built, for 51 million dollars, was closed.
A few days ago the name of the buyer came out: Tom Ford, who celebrated the lucrative sale of his firm by treating himself to real estate in the most exclusive enclave of Florida.
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The property sits at 241 Jungle Road, two blocks from the site of Jeffrey Epstein's haunted house and a four-minute drive from Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump's tropical base of operations.
Behind a thick and vigorous screen hedge and surrounded by slender native palm trees stands a large, rectilinear white concrete mansion on one floor.
An example of
classical modern
, as its architect, Daniel Kahan, likes to define it on his Instagram account, one of the many local professionals trained in satisfying and giving shape to the dreams and whims of the wealthy residents of the place.
“It doesn't scream in your face, like other modern architecture does,” Kahan declared in 2019, when his project received the award for excellence from the association that oversees architectural decorum in Palm Beach.
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With large windows on all sides, bleached oak floors and ceilings up to four and a half meters high, this newly minted villa is a waste of space and light.
The visitor who accesses it through its glazed main entrance can see the pool area, on the opposite side of the house, through the large central patio, also transparent, that articulates the house and is flanked by the library and the dining room. .
In the background, a large living area opens to a breakfast area and kitchen.
An office, a music room and three bedrooms, as well as another two in the guest annex, completed in its original layout this residence with a simple plan, conventional in good
taste.
fashionable and obsessive symmetry: although it has only one chimney, on the outside it is indistinguishable from the other three false ones raised so as not to decompensate the whole.
On the roof, 230 solar panels surrounded by grass beds produce energy equivalent to the consumption of the house.
Cerro Pelón, in New Mexico, is an imposing complex designed by Tadao Ando, surrounded by a farm of more than 8,000 hectares and which Ford sold in 2021 for around 40 million euros.
The purchase figure can be dizzying for ordinary mortals, but those 51 million are located in the price band that is usually handled in Palm Beach, one of the most sought-after areas in the United States.
For years now, the most important real estate located on this narrow island an hour and a quarter north of Miami, which stretches almost 30 kilometers parallel to the mainland, easily fetched around 100 million dollars.
In June last year, billionaire and eccentric Oracle founder Larry Ellison bought a sprawling estate in nearby Manalapan for $173 million, a year after paying $80 million for a sprawling Italianate mansion on a 7-acre estate across the street from to the ocean.
These types of top-priced assets are located on the oceanfront, or on the shores of the calmer and more navigable waters of Lake Worth, the inland lagoon that separates the island from the mainland (the mansions with their own jetties that appear in the movies). .
But Tom Ford's new house has neither one nor the other.
It is, in fact, the non-waterfront
property
, to use local real estate jargon, that has fetched the highest price to date.
In 2021, financier Rob Heyvaert paid $35.8 million for it to its original owners, who had purchased it in 2014 for $7.9 million.
In little more than a year, Heyvaert has made a profit of more than 15 million dollars.
Tom Ford, last May, at a gala held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. MIKE COPPOLA (AFP)
Since the pandemic, the luxury market in Palm Beach is experiencing a very particular
boom
fueled by great fortunes.
There is enormous demand and dwindling supply on this island of just over 10 square kilometers, something like twice the Retiro Park in Madrid.
While prices moderate in the rest of the most exclusive places in the United States, the very rich continue to take positions in this enclave of South Florida paying whatever they can, especially for those houses that are ready to move into.
“For many, time is more valuable than money.
There is not much to choose from, and whoever wants to have a house for the winter season”, —the high season that lasts there approximately until April—, “knows that they will have to pay for it”, Gary Pohrer recently declared to Bloomberg , director of sales for one of the largest real estate companies in Palm Beach.
Without a doubt, Ford, already immensely rich before the operation with Estée Lauder, is one of those chosen ones with enough financial muscle to pay 51 million for a warm winter like the one who pays a rent.
And with the security, in addition, of making a good investment.
Ford's Victorian mansion in London's Chelsea, which he also got rid of.
The one in Palm Beach is perhaps the most conventional of the properties that have been known to Tom Ford.
In 2019, he sold Richard Neutra's Brown-Sidney house for 20 million dollars, which he had bought in 1997, when he reigned at Gucci, for just over two million (in November 2022 it was published that Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi, other conspicuous fans of the game of
real estate,
had taken her for 29 million).
But when he sold the
mid-century
gem of the great Austrian-born modernist, Ford was not left homeless in California: in 2016 he had acquired the socialite's mansion for about $39
million
Betsy Bloomingdale, who died that same year;
a magnificent Italian-inspired villa built in the 1920s in Holmby Hills, and adapted to the Hollywood Regency style by Bloomingdale in the 1950s at the hands of Billy Haines, the renowned decorator to the stars, former actor and 'close friend' of Cary Grant .
A 'mid-century' gem: Richard Neutra's Brown-Sidney house, which Tom Ford had bought in 1997 and sold in 2019.
The reform of his new house in Los Angeles concluded in 2019, the same year that he acquired, for 18 million dollars, 'La 101', Roy Halston's mythical house on the Upper East Side designed and renovated by Paul Rudoph.
At that time he had Cerro Pelón, his ranch in New Mexico, for sale for 75 million, an imposing complex designed by Tadao Ando and surrounded by a farm of more than 8,000 hectares.
He finally sold it in 2021, after lowering the price of it by more than 30 million.
Even his most personal and beloved project, where he retired to escape the "artificial world" of fashion, was susceptible to becoming liquid to finance new operations.
Or place a new order for underpants.