In a Florida Town, Horses Upstage the Celebrities.
Home to billionaires with an equestrian bent, Wellington may be one of the few places in the world where it is possible to get a pickup game of polo.
In March, Liberty Media LMCA +0.17%billionaire John Malone and his wife, Leslie, spent $7.8 million on a
Provençal-style manor in Wellington, Fla., a small village bordering the
Everglades, 17 miles west of Palm Beach.
The 12,653-square-foot house has vaulted ceilings, a
topiary knot garden and a prime spot near a golf course at the Palm Beach Polo
Golf and Country Club. But best of all for the Malones, their new home is just a
gallop away from the 123-acre horse farm they also bought in March—for another
$12.5 million.
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"When you're talking about Wellington, the barn is the
most important thing," says Matt Varney of Wellington Equestrian Realty, who
represented the Malones in both sales. Mrs. Malone trains dressage horses and
"they are both just absolute animal lovers," says Mr. Varney.
Alexia Fodere for The Wall Street
Journal
A home in Palm Beach Polo Golf and Country Club in
Wellington, Fla.
Life in Wellington—particularly within the confines of
the lush 9,200-acre district known as the Equestrian Preserve—revolves around
horses. An estimated 9,000 reside there: Hanoverian dressage horses trained for
intricate footwork, Selle Français show jumpers and fleets of polo ponies. Some
60 miles of bridle paths lace the district, where speed limits are set at 25
miles per hour and street-crossing buttons are positioned at rider height.
Celebrities and billionaires sit in the saddles. The
Malones' neighbors in the Palm Beach Polo residential community include Charles Dolan, Cablevision CVC -0.67%founder
and chairman, and Frank McCourt, former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who
bought a home for $10.95 million in February, according to Palm Beach property
records. Bruce Springsteen has a house nearby.
This may be one of the few places on earth where it is
possible to get a pickup game of polo. Wellington has some 60 full-size polo
fields and three polo clubs. Its most infamous polo player, John Goodman, lives
under house arrest in his mansion near the grounds of the International Polo
Club he founded, as he awaits a new trial on charges of DUI manslaughter. His
lawyers have maintained he wasn't intoxicated at the time of the crash that
killed a 23-year-old Wellington native.
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Michael Bloomberg: The New York mayor's daughter,
Georgina, owns a 12-acre estate in Wellington's Mallet Hill neighborhood,
according to a local broker.
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Bill Gates: The Gates family spent this winter at a
4.8-acre Wellington estate.
Bloomberg News
Frank McCourt: The former L.A. Dodgers owner bought a
home for $10.95 million in February.
Bloomberg News
John Malone: The Liberty Media billionaire and his wife,
Leslie, bought a Wellington manor for $7.8 million.
Getty Images
Tommy Lee Jones: The actor has put his 50-acre ranch on
the market for $26.75 million.
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Jeremy Jacobs: The owner of the Boston Bruins owns the
200-acre Deeridge Farm estate in Wellington.
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Bruce Springsteen: The rocker owns a home in the
Equestrian Club Estates neighborhood; his daughter is a competitive rider.
Gary Porter/ Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel
Andrew Ziegler: His Artisan Farms estate is named for his
money-management firm.
Polo ranches fill the southern end of the preserve,
where actor Tommy Lee Jones just put San Saba, his 50-acre ranch—with full-size
polo field and stalls for 48 horses—on the market for $26.75 million.
Wellington's hub is the Palm Beach International
Equestrian Center, a 140-acre show ground that draws elite riders from around
the world for its 12-week Winter Equestrian Festival. The center's festival has
grown in size and stature since property developer Mark Bellissimo acquired the
grounds and 500 surrounding acres in 2006 through his Wellington Equestrian
Partners.
"We invested close to $230 million," says Mr.
Bellissimo, who saw Wellington's potential as "an equestrian-lifestyle
destination" when his wife and daughters began competing there. He invested $30
million to upgrade the center and expanded the festival, now a fixture of the
Olympic show-jumping circuit. Between mid-October and April, the horse show,
combined with polo and dressage events, draws 10,000 seasonal
visitors—practically double the preserve's permanent population. (The population
of the entire village of Wellington was 57,163 in 2011.)
"It's always so much fun in the fall when people start
coming back; it's like you're at camp," says best-selling romance and suspense
novelist Tami Hoag, an avid dressage rider who lives in Wellington. "You see all
these friends, and you're always going out to dinner. There's a big sense of
community with horse people."
That sense of community has frayed recently. Dressage, a
rarefied sport akin to horse ballet, was the unlikely trigger of Wellington's
version of a bare-fisted turf war. In 2011, Mr. Bellissimo built a new $8
million new dressage facility on a separate site from the equestrian center, as
part of a proposed 59-acre Equestrian Village that would include a hotel and
retail space.
The new dressage arenas are about a mile down the road
from Deeridge Farm, the 200-acre estate of Boston Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs,
who has devoted considerable resources toward killing the complex. The Jacobs
family directed hundreds of thousands of dollars into municipal elections, Mat
Forrest, a family spokesman, confirmed. In May 2012, the village council voted
down the hotel project. The future of the dressage complex itself is now in the
courts, the subject of multiple lawsuits brought by members of the Jacobs
family.
"The project as it stands today should never have been
built, especially in a protected preserve," the family said in a written
statement. The Jacobses see it as a Trojan horse that would open the preserve to
commercial development.
Mr. Bellissimo describes the complex as essential to
Wellington's place as "a winter equestrian capital." "The public posturing is
about preservation," he says of his opponents. "Really, the only preservation
being done is the preservation of their front driveway."
Despite the battle, demand for real estate in the
preserve continues to grow, though prices remain below 2006 levels. Mr. Varney
says his agency has sold $45.7 million in real estate since the start of the
year, compared with $38 million for all of 2012. Many buyers are coming from
overseas, including "a huge influx of people from South America in the polo
world and dressage," says Carol Sollak of Engel & Völkers Luxury Real
Estate.
House hunters might have trouble telling the mansions
from the barns. Bucolic subdivisions are filled with horse farms that resemble
Moroccan palaces and Mediterranean villas, with state-of-the-art equine
amenities (cushioned floors, walk-in whirlpools) and lavish architectural
details (oak-paneled stalls, chandeliers).
Local farm owners include Andrew and Carlene Ziegler of
Artisan Farms, named after their money-management firm. Lorillard CEO Murray Kessler—whose 18-year-old
daughter, Reed, was the youngest rider to compete in the Olympics—owns Kessler
Show Stables; hedge-fund billionaire James Dinan's Staysail Farm is just a short
trot down the lane.
These farms are prized for their proximity to the
equestrian center. If your Belgian Warmblood can hack—horse-speak for walk—to
the ring on a show day, you don't have to bother loading him in a van or renting
him a stall at the show grounds.
"You can measure [property] value in steps to the ring
of the Grand Prix field," says Martha W. Jolicoeur of Illustrated Properties. In
2006, she says, she sold a 12-acre estate with a barn in the coveted Mallet Hill
neighborhood—a short hack to the show grounds—to Georgina Bloomberg, a
competitive show jumper and daughter of New York City Mayor Michael
Bloomberg.
Ms. Bloomberg is but one of many heiresses to hang her
riding hat in Wellington. Jessica Springsteen, whose father, Bruce, owns a home
near the show grounds in the Equestrian Club Estates neighborhood, competes in
the Winter Festival. So does Jennifer Gates, the 17-year-old daughter of Microsoft's MSFT +1.61%Bill Gates. The Gates family and their
horses spent the past winter at a 4.8-acre estate with a 20-stall barn in Mallet
Hill, according to local agents. The property, which Mr. Gates reportedly rented
for $500,000 for the season, just sold for $8.7 million.
"Wealthy people like horses," says Mr. Varney. "Wealthy
people's kids like riding horses. It's a relatively small world."
Corrections & Amplifications
The name of the real-estate agency Engel & Völkers was misspelled as Engel & Völckers in an earlier version of this article.
The name of the real-estate agency Engel & Völkers was misspelled as Engel & Völckers in an earlier version of this article.
