Domino Sugar Heir Sweetens Property Portfolio With Luxe House in the Hamptons

So you’re the son and namesake of a sugar baron. You and your wife own a nice place in Palm Beach, where you spend most of your time. A couple years ago, you treat yourselves to a $2.1 million co-op in on a high floor of one of the most prestigious apartment houses along New York’s famed Fifth Avenue. Now what? You drop $12.65 million on a gorgeous house in the Hamptons, of course! Back in November, Lourdes and Pepe Fanjul Jr. purchased the beautifully restored 1840 house in Southampton’s estate section. Lori Schiaffino at Compass was the listing broker, and the sellers were Bambi and Nigel Goodhews.

So where’d all that money come from? The senior Fanjuls, four brothers, escaped Cuba in 1959 when Castro took over. Their family had been in the sugar business in Cuba for more than a century before that, and the family rebuilt their sugar business in the United States. Florida Crystals, headquartered in West Palm Beach, farms 190,000 acres in south Florida. American Sugar Refining, which currently owns the Domino brand as well as the famous British Tate & Lyle brand, is a subsidiary of Florida Crystals. Fanjul, Jr., is the vice president of Fanjul Corp and executive vice president of Florida Crystals; his namesake father is the second eldest of the brothers, who together control a sugar and real estate empire valued at $8.2 billion. Sweet.

With ten bedrooms, six bathrooms, and two half-baths, all in 9,000 square feet, there’s lots of room for the Fanjuls and plenty of their extended family at their elegant new Southampton getaway. The plot isn’t huge, at just over three-quarters of an acre, but of course there’s a beautiful hedged pool out back, as well as extremely pretty flower gardens and shrubbery.

The Goodhews are British, which accounts for the decidedly English flavor to the decoration and garden. They paid $6.5 million for the property in 2008 and then renovated in 2011; the listing mentions that the owners “took care to stay true to the period by utilizing many of the original materials as well as replicating and replacing the millwork and hardware throughout the house.”

Standout features include the carved Breche Violette (purple marble) fire surround in the drawing room, the dining room wallpaper, hand-painted by Colefax & Fowler in London, the potting area with its amusingly be-goggled deer head, and the breakfast room cabinets that hold daily dishware and pottery. As a bonus, several of the bedrooms have access to large balconies overlooking the gardens.

Well known landscape architects John Beitel and Miranda Brooks — she did up Anna Wintour’s Long Island garden — designed the exterior. Rose gardens, apple and pear orchards and the Hamptons’ signature hedges make for an enchanting setting, perfect for lying back with a cold glass of lemonade, made with refined white Domino-brand sugar, of course.