| Sarasota, FL 88 °F |  |
Top Stories
Real Estate Junkie
A House With History If only the walls could talk in this 1949 Cherokee Park home. Built for a circus attorney named Eagle—he represented many of the Munchkins who appeared in The Wizard of Oz—the house has a gracious, old-fashioned feel with all sorts of hard-to-find period details. Rumor says it was designed by one of [...]
Read More >>Top of The Market
A four-bedroom, five-bath home at 344 W. Royal Flamingo Drive—one of Bird Key’s most coveted streets because of its open bay and sunset views—was the highest-priced Sarasota County home sold in November at $2,675,000. Built in 1998, it went on the market in January 2011 at $3,495,000. The listing agent was Lynn Koy of Coldwell [...]
Read More >>On The Homefront
One of the joys of a Florida summer kitchen is winter. True, everything tastes better when it’s cooked outside. But the simplest outdoor meal can seem deliciously decadent when your friends are freezing up North. That’s one reason why the appetite for summer kitchens is growing in Sarasota, from tiny galley kitchens nestled under canvas [...]
Read More >>Top of the Market
A five-bedroom Gulf-front residence set behind a canopy of century-old oaks at 6380 Manasota Key Road was the highest-priced sale in Sarasota County in October. The 6,638-square-foot home, which sold for $4.8 million after an original 2009 list price of $7.5 million, was built in 2008 and boasts the highest-end amenities. Case in point: The [...]
Read More >>Home at Last
It seems there are two kinds of people in the world—those who gravitate toward planned communities and those who swear they would never live in one. They’re too bland, this latter group says, too uniform, with too many rules. They prefer a place where buildings and neighborhoods just appear according to the needs and whims [...]
Read More >>On The Homefront
In my growing file of dream homes, I have architect’s renderings and floor plans from the east coast of Florida, Las Vegas and Santa Fe. Those were collected before we moved to Sarasota. Here, my architectural reveries are filed by community: Lakewood Ranch, the Founder’s Club, Silver Oak, University Park, etc. The sub-folders go on [...]
Read More >>Neighborhood Watch
“Bird Key is experiencing a renaissance,” says George Appel of Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate, who has lived in nine residences in the manicured bayfront neighborhood since moving to Sarasota in the early 1980s. A scrappy spoil island that underwent transformative dredging projects in the 1920s and early 1960s, Bird Key is a boater’s paradise [...]
Read More >>Snowbird Confidential
Admit it—you’re intrigued. Sarasota, this place that you’ve stumbled upon, seems like a real find. It might be nice to have a place here. Now that you have the time and money to get out of New Jersey—or Illinois, or Ohio, or Connecticut—for the winter. And then you could eventually retire here. . . But [...]
Read More >>One Great Room
A Vintage Cottage Patience is a virtue that has finally paid off for Susie and Mark Holt. The owners of Posh on Palm, Sarasota’s beloved emporium of shabby-chic home décor, are living the lifestyle the shop embodies in a 1920s cottage on Casey Key. “We’ve been looking for years, and finally found the little beach [...]
Read More >>Homefront
A STRONG COMEBACK As a full-time realtor who relocated her business to Sarasota from New England in 2007, Pam Charron of Michael Saunders & Company sees a definite change in buyer motivation. “When I first joined this market, it was evident that we were in a buyer’s market,” she says. “I didn’t realize that the [...]
Read More >>