Star Island
Star (Island) Destroyer House is Back, With Happy Landscaping
Well, folks, it looks like Curbed Miami's announcement of 'Star Destroyer Down' was used about as over-optimistically as the second Bush Administration's 'Mission Accomplished', but at least we didn't take over an aircraft carrier and hire a stunt-double President (Sorry, but dubya did not land that plane himself. Or was he in the backseat? Ugh, can somebody check?).
The Star Destroyer look-alike house is back on Star Island. Also contrary to our previous reports, the design architect is actually Ricardo Bofill, not Beilinson Gomez, the architects of record. Sorry Bey. And at just over 21,000 square feet according to the plans, the design itself is only a few thousand square feet smaller than first proposed, although from the renderings you'd never tell. The building is exactly the same size. The listed square footage has gone down a bit due to an error in calculation the first time around. And it's covered in a cornucopia of landscaping, combining all the aesthetics of an Easter egg hunt, May Day (the private school variety with a may pole, not the worker's revolution day) and a Stalinist blimp mooring platform. The 'green' roof looks like less of a real effort for sustainability than the realization that they could build a second back yard up there. The solar panels are a nice frill.
The Star (Island) Destroyer House Has Been Defeated
Sorry Star Wars fans/supervillian wannabes, it looks like the 'Star Destroyer' house may not be coming to Star Island after all, at least perhaps not in its originally intended form. Owner Shay Kostiner withdrew his application from the Miami Beach Design Review Board today to demolish the historic house (the home of one of Miami Beach's founding fathers) on the site to make room for the new place, and "wants to examine ways to save it." The Monterey style house, which is an actual style and not just a variation on Bond-villain chic, was built circa-1935 for John H. Levi, the man who brought Carl Fisher to Miami Beach and who led many of the dredging operations that turned mangroves into western Miami Beach. So, yes, you can blame him for all the flooding on West Avenue.
Stuart Miller Wants to Preserve 22 Star Island by Hiding it
Tomorrow, redesigned plans for Lennar CEO Stuart Miller's mega estate at 22 Star Island Drive will go before the Miami Beach Design Review Board, where they'll see that Miller does in fact intend to preserve most (but not all) of the historic house now on the site. They just won't have much luck finding it in the project's renderings, which are part of the package that Stuart's architects submitted to the board. Nor would they if ever invited to the finished product for that matter.
According to Stuart's plans, the house's porte cochere, one of its architectural highlights, will be demolished, while the rest of the structure is moved to the opposite side of the lot and flipped almost 180 degrees. It will be moved back from the water and it will face an almost entirely windowless two-story wall, making it mostly invisible to anybody inside the new house.
Gloria & Emilio Estefan List 'Nena's Villa' Rental Property for Wayyy Too Much Money
Long-time Star Island residents, the Estefans are listing one of their Star Island properties for $40 million. No, not their two-house main compound on two acres of land with easterly views over the bay, but the 1.34 acre, MacArthur Causeway-facing lot with its 4,700 square foot main house and 2,600 square foot guest house, both of which they were using as income-generating rental properties collectively called Nena's Villa. (you could rent them separately or together, for a whopping $75,000). Listed by the Jills, the property is obviously hugely overpriced, particularly considering a far more attractive house (way larger, brand new, more pools, not next to a highway, etc.) just sold on the other side of the island for $30 mill. If Jill Eber and Jill Hertzberg keep pricing their properties for maximum headline grabbing potential (paging the Versace Mansion) they're going to start getting a reputation.