A representative of billionaire Ken Griffin has aced a proposal for a new lakefront tennis court designed for a vacant lot on the south end of the Citadel hedge fund manager’s massive Palm Beach estate.
The town’s Architectural Commission on Jan. 24 unanimously approved the design of the clay tennis court for the lot, which lies about a half-mile south of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club.
A Griffin-linked company paid $18 million for the lot in June 2019 as part of its $104.99 purchase of La Follia, an ocean-to-lake estate with a Mediterranean-style mansion at 1295 S. Ocean Blvd., according to the property records. The properties were sold to Griffin’s limited liability company, Wemio LLC, by the estate of the late banking heiress and theater producer Terry Allen Kramer.
The oceanfront mansion stands on a lot of about 2.6 acres on the stretch of coastal road known to locals as Billionaires Row. The lakefront lot on the opposite side of South Ocean Boulevard measures a little less than 1.5 acres and has been vacant for years. It has about 206 feet of frontage on the Intracoastal Waterway.
The buyer’s side of the 2019 sale was linked to Griffin and his mother, Catherine Gratz Griffin, according to sources familiar with the sale and confirmed by the Palm Beach Daily News through public documents.
The former Kramer estate is part of the 27 acres — mostly vacant — that companies controlled by Griffin bought for more than $500 million in transactions that began in 2012, according to courthouse records and estimates by the Palm Beach Daily News. The estate is by far the largest in Palm Beach.
As previously reported by the Palm Beach Daily News, Griffin is building his mother an oceanfront mansion on roughly 7 acres on the north side of the estate. Griffin lives with his family in Miami, where he relocated his Citadel hedge fund and securities empire in 2022. Forbes estimates his wealth at $37.1 billion.
Reviewing the Palm Beach tennis court project for the first time, the Architectural Commission had only a few comments for landscape architect Dustin Mizell of Palm Beach-based Environment Design Group, who presented the project at Town Hall.
The tennis court itself will be hidden from the view of passersby on the street by landscaping that Mizell described as a “green wall.”
The design will preserve the dense vegetation that buffers the lot on its north and south borders. But new trees, including a “specimen” kapok, will be planted.
“This is beautiful. The tree choices are lovely,” Commissioner Betsy Shiverick told Mizell.
The project also will include a viewing platform and a brick-paved path to the lot’s dock in the Intracoastal along with an area for “service parking” on a reinforced grassy area near the street.
New gates for two existing driveway entrances will be built to match the ones at the former Kramer estate across the street.
A key part of the project, Mizell said, was raising the ground level for the tennis court to prevent flooding during heavy rainstorms or larger-than-average tides affecting the Intracoastal.
Mizell said that currently, water intrudes into the property from below ground during these events.
“There is no way you can have a tennis court that’s going to be clay” without elevating the site, he said.
Alternate Commissioner Daniel Floersheimer, who voted on the project in the absence of commissioner Chairman Jeffery Smith, asked about drainage plans for the property.
“It’s a sophisticated system, and it certainly isn’t cheap. But we are working all that out with the engineers,” Mizell said, referring to consultants at Kimley-Horn & Associates of Delray Beach.
In addition to approving the tennis-court project’s design, the architectural panel voted unanimously to endorse a request for a code variance related to the height of the court’s fence enclosure. The Town Council will consider approving the variance and other code issues for the project at an upcoming meeting.
Kramer, who died in May 2019, completed her Italian-style custom home in 1993 with her late husband, Irwin Kramer, six years before his death. He was managing director of Allen & Co., a private New York investment firm founded by his wife’s father, the late Charlie Allen Jr.
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Darrell Hofheinz is a USA TODAY Network of Florida journalist who writes about Palm Beach real estate in his weekly “Beyond the Hedges” column. He welcomes tips about real estate news on the island. Email[email protected], call 561-820-3831 or tweet @PBDN_Hofheinz.