unreal estate
by
MICHAEL GROSS The front door of the lateJohn Kluge’s ocean house
House of Many Scholars John Kluge’s Casa Sin Nombre—the House with No Name—on the ocean in Palm Beach is being sold to finance scholarships at Columbia University.
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n 1994, a year after Forbes ranked him the third-richest American, with his $5.9 billion fortune, John Kluge, the 79-yearold television mogul, set out to acquire a great estate in Palm Beach. Money was no object. “He bought three or four homes in one day,” says Richard Cox Cowell, who owned one of them. Kluge’s attorney had called Cowell, and Cowell had said his house at 121 El Bravo Way—one of the three prestigious east-west streets sometimes called “the Famous Els” (the others are El Brillo and El Vedado)—wasn’t for sale. But Kluge wouldn’t take no for an answer, and knocked on Cowell’s door himself. “I’d known him quite well,” says Cowell, a lifelong resident of the resort town, who repeated his refusal to sell the mid-block 15-room home, built in 1921 by the town’s signature architect, Addison Mizner. Kluge pressed: “What’s it worth?” Cowell—who’d bought it two decades earlier for $345,000—said $2.5 million. Kluge immediately offered $4.5 million. Recalls Cowell: “I said, ‘You’re crazy.’” “I don’t care,” Kluge replied, writing a check on the spot. Looking west from the Not only did Cowell take the check, he cut coquina-stone courtyard of the short a planned ski trip to St. Moritz to close garden house the sale within three weeks, as Kluge demanded. By then, Kluge had bought three more adjacent properties, paying “about $17 million” in total, Cowell says, still sounding a bit boggled today as he adds, “He tore mine down for a garden. He knew exactly what he wanted—a big estate.” Kluge demolished two houses, in fact, and kept two more on 4.3 park-like acres just east of the Everglades Golf Course, three blocks from Worth Avenue and bordering the Atlantic Ocean. His magnificent gardens became his pride and joy. Last year, that estate became the most expensive listed property on the barrier island,
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but the seller wasn’t Kluge, who’d died in 2010, at age 95. Recalling his days as a scholarship student at Columbia University in the midst of the Great Depression, Kluge, in 2007, had made the grandest gesture of his life, pledging $400 million to his alma mater for financial aid for needy students. His was the largest gift of its kind in history (not counting his earlier gifts to Columbia of $110 million). His Palm Beach estate was part of that epochal transfer of wealth. Three of the four lots Kluge bought boast important Palm Beach provenance. Only one, at 86 Middle Road and designed in 1966 by Allen S. Babcock for a stockbroker, was undistinguished. The next-youngest residence on the property was a Bermuda Georgianstyle colonial revival house, by the prolific Palm Beach architect Marion Sims Wyeth, built in 1931 for Peter H.B. Frelinghuysen, of the Revolutionary-era Morristown, New Jersey, family. The Frelinghuysens kept their house for many decades before selling it (along with a 1935 garage, cottage and putting green, at 88 Middle Road) to Robert Kanuth, a Washington, D.C., bond broker and, later, the owner of the Pelican Bay Suites hotel on Grand Bahama Island. The most prestigious of the Kluge properties was 91 Middle Road, a.k.a. 582 South Ocean Boulevard, a designated landmark. The Renaissance Revival villa with Palladian motifs was also designed by Mizner in 1921 and named Villa Audita by his clients, Alfred and Elizabeth Kay. Kay, another stockbroker, lived in Palm Beach for more than six decades with his wife, the editor of The Garden Club of America’s national journal. They were experts in local botany and donated a 135-acre plantation nearby to create the Pine Jog Environmental Education Center at Florida Atlantic University. Their house was later owned by William and Dora Browning Donner. Dora was