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Palm Beach Daily News

Jupiter Island Volk-designed home sale has Palm Beach ties

By: Darrell Hofheinz
Published: 5/14/2011Source: Palm Beach Daily News

Two familiar names on the Palm Beach real estate scene were involved in the recent sale, recorded with a price $10.35 million, of an oceanfront Jupiter Island home designed in 1965 by society architect John Volk.

 

Agent Rosalind Clarke of the Corcoran Group in Palm Beach had co-listed the five-bedroom, modified-Georgian-style home at 293 S. Beach Road for $10.5 million with Waterfront Properties and Club Communities of Jupiter Island.

 

Palm Beach broker Lawrence Moens of Lawrence A. Moens Associates acted on behalf of the buyers, a family with three children. Moens provided no other information about the buyers, who acquired the property through a trust, according to the warranty deed recorded May 9 by the Martin County Clerk’s office.

 

The deed listed three limited liability companies — one incorporated in Delaware and the other two in Michigan — as the owners of the house, which has 11,839 “total” square feet of living space, inside and out.

 

Lynn and Richard Sabella bought the house in March 2006 for $10.8 million through Cadillac Exchange LLC, Three Rivers Development LLC and Garfield Enterprises LLC, property records show.

 

Volk had designed the house for Mary Holland Ford and John B. Ford Jr., chairman of Michigan-based and family-owned Wyandotte Chemical Co. John B. Ford Jr. was also known for helping revitalize the then-floundering Detroit Symphony in the 1950s.

 

The Sabellas carried out extensive renovations to the house, working to maximize water views from the property’s 308 feet of ocean frontage.

 

“The most notable thing about the property was that it was a 1960s house that was functionally obsolete,” Clarke said Friday. “They did a very clever job of making the house much more useful and stylish while keeping the exterior architecture intact, in keeping with the character of Jupiter Island.”

 

Experienced renovators, the Sabellas preserved many of Volk’s original features, including the unusual stepped-pyramid roofs that topped a golf-cart garage and two poolside buildings, according to an article about the house published in the Palm Beach Daily News in 2008.

 

“My husband and I love old houses,” Lynn Sabella said in the article. “We were looking for something special to renovate as opposed to doing a new-construction project.”

 

Their alterations included improving the floor plan’s traffic flow by pushing out the original walls to create space for an interior hallway. They also eliminated the obsolete staff quarters to make room for a 45-foot-long oceanview family room.

 

Carefully salvaged materials, including coquina stone, from the renovation were reused elsewhere during the renovation, Clarke added.

 

The renovated house was listed for sale three years ago with a price of $25 million but was subsequently taken off the market.

 

Dated April 28, the deed was signed by Richard Sabella as managing partner of the three limited liability companies involved in the transaction. It listed West Palm Beach attorney Ronald S. Kochman as the trustee for the buyer, The 293 Shangrila Realty Trust.

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