Star power, purchasing power
The Providence Journal, December 26, 2007 by Richard Salit, Journal Staff Writer
Two venerable mansions and one sprawling seaside site changed hands this year, sending a group of nuns packing and bringing a Hollywood star and a successful investor to the area.
Academy Award-winning actor Nicolas Cage purchased the Gray Craig Estate in Middletown for $15.7 million. The 24,000-square-foot, brick-and-stone manor, which sits on 26 secluded acres bordering the Norman Bird Sanctuary, offers sweeping views of the Atlantic Ocean.
Cage, who is married to Alice Kim and has a toddler son, is said to have bought the house as a primary residence. The previous owners were Mark J. and Becky Ruhmann Levin, of Boston, who used it as summer residence.
Another out-of-town buyer bought Miramar, a renowned mansion on Newport's illustrious Bellevue Avenue. Investor David B. Ford paid $17.15 million for the 8-acre oceanfront chateau, the most ever paid for a residence on Aquidneck Island. It had been owned since 1971 by real estate developer Andrew Panteleakis.
Ford, a retired partner at Goldman Sachs, the global investment banking and securities firm, is an entrepreneur who has interests in a film production company, restaurants, an art trading business and ranch and water operations in Gambia. He reportedly plans a historically accurate restoration of Miramar, a 30,000-square foot "summer cottage" built for railway magnate George Dunton Widen, who died in the sinking of the Titanic.
Only a few miles away, the long-time home of Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny was sold. The Brenton Road property--13.5 pastoral acres and two unremarkable buildings--was sold by the Diocese of Providence for $4.3 million. The sale to a corporation linked to the family of Campbell's soup heiress Dorrance H. Hamilton, a Newporter renowned for her philanthropy and preservation of open space, included a deed restriction requiring the property be used only for residential purposes.
Newport City Councilwoman Kathryn E. Leonard, who is an associate of Campbell and the real estate agent who handled the Cluny sale, said she was pleased that both it and the Miramar property will be kept intact.
"It's nice to see people are keeping these properties in one piece," she said. She called it a "godsend to the city because it keeps the property values up."
The Providence Journal, December 26, 2007
by Richard Salit, Journal Staff Writer
|
