Barely seven months after it first popped up for sale with an eye-popping $150 million ask, a lavish South Florida compound owned by businesswoman and philanthropist Adrienne Arsht has sold for $106.9 million — by far a record for the priciest single-family residential transaction in Miami-Dade County, eclipsing billionaire hedge funder Ken Griffin’s purchase of a Star Island mansion in December 2021 for $75 million.
Records reveal the new owner is — wait for it — Ken Griffin, who has broken the record he set less than a year ago. Griffin is the founder and CEO of the global alternative investment firm Citadel, and is widely reported to have a net worth that tops $26 billion.
Per The Real Deal, who first announced the transaction, Griffin has spent more than $350 million assembling residential land in Palm Beach, where Citadel is opening an office, and purchased multiple waterfront properties on Star Island and in Coral Gables. This year, his firm has also spent hundreds of millions of dollars on commercial real estate in the Brickell financial district, which is just north of the Arsht Estate.
Griffin also owns the most expensive U.S. home ever sold, a $238 million New York City penthouse.
Originally purchased for a total of $16 million by Arsht — a former attorney and banking executive widely recognized for her $30 million contribution to Miami’s arts center, which was renamed the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts — the Arsht Estate spans four full acres in the exclusive Coconut Grove enclave of Miami, adjacent to the Vizcaya Museum & Gardens.
Several structures include a pair of two-story homes known as Indian Spring and Villa Serena, plus ancillary buildings — for a total of over 25,000 square feet of living space with 12 bedrooms and 17 baths, all of it resting on over 400 feet of waterfront footage offering up sweeping views of the bay, Key Biscayne and downtown Miami.
As for the primary Indian Spring residence, that place was built by Arsht in the late 1990s on land that was once owned by Ziegfeld Follies star Peggy Hopkins Joyce and her then-husband, millionaire lumberman James Stanley Joyce. Designed by architect Jose Gelabert-Naviaon, the five-bedroom house features a courtyard for greeting guests and formal fireside living room, as well as a grand salon with a carved ceiling and French doors spilling out to an al fresco dining terrace. A formal dining room seats up to 20 and the family room is affectionately known as the “garden room.”
Other highlights include a gourmet kitchen outfitted with a center island and two butler’s pantries, wood-paneled office and rotunda offering panoramic city views, along with a posh upstairs master retreat boasting dual balconies, walk-in closets and baths. Rounding it all out: lushly landscaped grounds hosting a full-size tennis court and pool sporting a duo of baths carved into the coral rock beneath its deck, plus a two-bedroom, two-bath guest suite and gym atop the six-car garage.
