Sometimes we dream about the house we’d design if money were no object — where we’d site it, the architectural style, the furniture and objects we’d place inside.
The owner of this sleek Miami Beach mansion, John Jansheski, founder of the oral care company DenTek, and the son of the inventor of the Dental Pik, imagined sinks in the shapes of giant heads and then went on to buy not just one but two Forma Mentis washbasins for his home’s master bath. Designed by Italian architect/designer Simone Micheli, the outré sink is described thus in marking materials: “basin in head-shape ceramic, with up-down drainage system, available in internal white finish and gold external finish or internal white finish and external platinum finish.” The owner chose gold, naturally.
The DenTek founder paid about $10.8 million for his almost one-acre Star Island estate in 2011. At the time it had an historic Walter DeGarmo-designed house that was later moved and converted to a guesthouse to make way for a larger and far glitzier contemporary main residence designed by South African firm SAOTA and set near the bulkheaded shoreline. All in there’s about 25,000 square feet across the two structures, with 11 bedrooms and 12 bathrooms, plus three more powder rooms.
The gigantic and aggressively modern main house includes six Brobdingnagian bedrooms, vast walls of floor-to-ceiling glass, numerous and spacious living, dining and entertaining spaces, and a cavernous kitchen with all the warmth and antiseptic charm of the Miami-Dade morgue. The waterside gym with sauna, steam room and cold plunge, the private dock, the swimming pool and poolside cabana, and the spa area decked out with a massage room and a hair salon are, admittedly, pretty nice.
If the property goes for anywhere near its $90 million ask, it would set a record for home sales in Miami-Dade County. And, as stratospheric as the asking price may be, it’s not entirely out of the question for Star Island, one of the smallest and most exclusive of South Florida neighborhoods, with just 34 multimillion-dollar homes. It was, after all, only in December that a teardown mansion on Star Island sold for a $75 million — reportedly to billionaire Ken Griffin — a record for the most expensive home ever sold in Miami. Located just off Biscayne Bay, Star Island is connected to the mainland through MacArthur Causeway. Miami Beach and downtown Miami are minutes away.
Alyssa Morgan, with One Sotheby’s International Realty, is the listing agent. She is also Jansheski’s ex-wife, so maybe she can explain to potential buyers what the thought was behind the giant golden head-shaped sinks.
