Bob Vila, ‘This Old House' star, sells waterfront Palm Beach home for $33 million
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The seven-bedroom house was built in 1949 but remodeled and expanded. The property has 7,621 square feet of living space, inside and out.
Vila, a former chairman of the Palm Beach Architectural Commission, starred in the home-improvement shows 'This Old House' and 'Restore America with Bob Vila.'
Television handyman Bob Vila of "This Old House" fame and his wife, Diana Barrett, have parted with their lakefront Palm Beach, Florida estate for $33 million, the price recorded with the deed.
On the market with different agencies since late 2023, the estate at 690 Island Drive on Everglades Island had recently seen a $4 million price reduction to $35.9 million.
A trust was on the buyer's side of the transaction, the deed recorded June 17 shows. Palm Beach attorney Scott W. Hoffman of the Alley, Maass, Rogers & Lindsay law firm serves as trustee of the trust. Because of privacy rules governing trusts, no information about anyone else connected to the trust was immediately available in public records.
The seven-bedroom house was built in 1949 but remodeled and expanded by Vila and Barrett. The house has 7,621 square feet of living space, inside and out, and the interior space totals about 6,300 square feet.
Plans for the property under the new ownership are not yet known, including whether the house will be razed and replaced with a new one.
The deed lists Vila and Barrett's mailing address as a house at 260 N. Woods Road on Palm Beach's North End. The multiple listing service shows that four-bedroom house on a third of an acre has been under contract, having been listed at $12.9 million last fall.
On the east side of Everglades Island, the house Vila and Barrett just sold on Island Drive measures four-fifths of an acre with about 175 feet of frontage on the Intracoastal Waterway, a dock and a boat lift. The rear of the house looks directly across the lakeside pool patio to the Lake Worth Lagoon and the rest of Palm Beach.
The house had been in Barrett's family since the mid-1970s. She had owed it in her name since 2005, when she paid $6.1 million for it, property records show.
'When (Diana) bought the house, we were living in Massachusetts and had a beach house in Boca Grande, Florida, but Diana and I visited it frequently,' Vila told the Palm Beach Daily News, part of the USA TODAY Network, for an April 2024 article about the property.
The estate has several areas designed for outdoor living, including a red-brick loggia. Large expanses of windows and glass pocket doors also capture water views.
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Vila, a former chairman of the Palm Beach Architectural Commission, starred in the home-improvement shows 'This Old House' and 'Restore America with Bob Vila.' He also has his own website, BobVila.com. His wife's professional resume includes teaching business and public health at Harvard University.
The sale closed June 12, according to the multiple listing service.
Broker Christian Angle of Christian Angle Real Estate handled both sides of the sale, the MLS shows. He had held the listing since September 2024, when he priced it at $39.5 million.
Angle, Vila and Barrett could not immediately be reached for comment.
The house has been on the market since November 2023, when it was first listed at $52.9 million by one of Vila and Barrett's children, real estate agent Chris Vila of PB Realty Advisors. Brown Harris Stevens agents Liza Pulitzer, Whitney McGurk and Blair Kirwan later co-listed the property PB Realty Advisors. Angle then took over the listing alone.
The homeowners reduced the price several times since the property was first listed.
The house has not been for sale in nearly 50 years when it was put on the market in 2023, according to the original sales listing. It had been in Barrett's family before she bought it from the estate of her late mother, Gioconda King. King, who died in 2004, was the widow of investment banker Joseph King and had owned the house since 1975.
'It's a lovely mixture of Old Florida with a real family legacy — but brought up to 2024 standards,' Barrett told the Palm Beach Daily News last year.
Vila and Barrett's improvement projects to the property were detailed and extensive, Vila told the Palm Beach Daily News for the same article.
'The house had to be completely renovated,' Vila said. 'It was lovely to look at, beautifully decorated and filled with antiques. But when you take everything out, if you are a builder, you say to yourself, 'There are problems.' The electric (system) and plumbing were antiquated, and the roof needed to be replaced.'
With a fireplace, the living room connects to an expansive poolside loggia that is completely enclosed with glass windows and doors.
The layout also includes a water-view main bedroom suite, a dining room and a library. A newer wing includes the kitchen, a pantry, a breakfast-and-family room, a laundry area, the two-car garage and a guesthouse addition.
Outdoor-living areas also include a patio at the home's entry and an open-air brick loggia and pool patio shared by the family room and guesthouse. To the south of the family room is another patio and a slat house for growing orchids.
Barrett had the house listed as her primary home in Palm Beach County property records.
Island Drive runs the length of Everglades Island, an island three-quarters of a mile long in Palm Beach's Estate Section. The island is connected to the rest of Palm Beach by a short bridge to Island Road.
The house on North Woods Road that Vila and Barrett listed as their mailing address on the newly recorded Island Drive deed was built in 1977, records show. With a two-car garage and a poolside outdoor loggia, the one-story house has 4,184 square feet of living space, inside and out.
The MLS shows agent Jim McCann of Premier Estate Properties listed the house on North Woods Road for sale in mid-November. McCann declined to comment.
The Woods Road house last changed hands in October 2020, courthouse records show. At that time, it was bought by the 260N Property Limited Partnership of Toronto, which paid a recorded $6.28 million for it.
In November 2024, Vila and his wife sold, for $13.375 million, a 1940s-era Palm Beach house at 345 Pendleton Lane in Midtown. The couple had bought the Pendleton Lane house for a recorded $12.5 million in December 2023 and then carried out a modest renovation, inside and out, according to building records.
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 dhofheinz@pbdailynews.com, call 561-820-3831 or tweet @PBDN_Hofheinz.
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