PB neighbors split cost of home between properties
Neighbors on either side of a 1950sera Palm Beach home in the Estate Section have bought it in an off-market 50/ 50 deal and plan to raze the house and use the land to expand their properties.
The house at 111 Via Del Lago was the longtime home of the late real estate agent and businessman Edmund “Ned”
C. Monell Jr., who died last fall.
Three companies associated with Palm Beach art collector and Worth Avenue landlord Jane Holzer and her family paid a recorded $7.762 million for the eastern half, which adjoins her vacant oceanview lot at 980 S. Ocean Blvd. on the northeast corner of Via Del Lago.
Developer Todd Michael Glaser and his interior-designer wife, Kim, paid the same amount for the other half with plans to add it to their landmarked estate at 125 Via Del Lago. The couple hopes to build a guesthouse with a below-grade woodworking studio, Glaser told the Palm Beach Daily News.
He declined to discuss specifics of the transaction. Holzer had no comment, she told the Daily News.
Two deeds for the off-market transactions were recorded June 4. They show the buyers paid a combined $15.524 million for the house.
The former Monell property measures about two-fifths of an acre. It’s the second property west of South Ocean Boulevard and lies a quarter-mile north of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club.
Built in 1952, the house at 111 Via Del Lago has three bedrooms and 3,777 total square feet, property records show. The ownership of the house had been associated with Ned Monell since 1990,
when he and Terry T. Monell bought it for $716,000, property records show. Ned Monell died Nov. 13 at age 65, public records show.
On the buyers’ side, Holzer achieved fame in the 1960s as “Baby Jane” Holzer when she starred in avant-garde films by the late Andy Warhol. Today, her real estate assets include commercial property on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach. She has lived in Palm Beach for almost all of her life.
The three Holzer-related companies involved in the purchase on Via Del Lago were all registered in Florida and are listed in property records as the owners of the lot next door at 980 S. Ocean Blvd. They include 980 South Ocean (Emma) LLC and 980 S. Ocean (Ian) LLC, each with an ownership interest of 24.5% in 111 Via Del Lago. The third company, 980 South Ocean (Jane) LLC has a 51% ownership interest, the deed shows.
In late 2022, Holzer won the town’s approval to build a contemporary-style house with West Indies-influenced architecture on her family’s half-acre corner lot. But ground has never been broken on the project. Holzer-linked entities bought that land with a since-razed house for a recorded $8 million in August 2020.
The Glasers have a complicated history with the historic house they own at 125 Via Del Lago. A Glaser-controlled company paid $11 million for the house in early 2018. Work crews carried out a major renovation before the developer sold the property — on a lot measuring four-fifths of an acre — for $16.1 million in 2019.
In August 2022, the Glasers re-purchased the house, paying a recorded $23.286 million for it. They have since homesteaded the estate as their primary residence in the latest Palm Beach County tax rolls.
The Glasers’ Mediterranean-style estate was built in 1929 and has a total of eight bedrooms in the main residence and a poolside guesthouse. Together, the buildings encompass 12,641 square feet of living space, inside and out.
Still in the preliminary planning stage, the guesthouse the Glasers hope to build would have a library and a gym for their family. The woodworking studio would accommodate Todd Glaser’s longtime interest in the craft, he said.
“I took woodshop (classes) in school, and I have a carpentry background,” he added.
The former Monell house was sold to the Glasers and the three Holzer entities by attorney Maurizio J. Morello, who acted as successor trustee of the Edmund C. Monell Jr. Revocable Trust, according to the deeds.
Morello is executive vice president, assistant treasurer and a director of the Ambrose Monell Foundation, named for an industrialist, businessman and financier who died in 1921. Ned Monell was his grandson, and the Monell family had deep ties to Palm Beach.
Ned Monell’s professional résumé included tenure as a real estate agent at Sotheby’s International Realty in Palm Beach.
Todd Glaser and his wife have been involved in buying, building, renovating and selling homes in Palm Beach over the past several years — often working with investors — through his Miami Beach-based company, Todd Michael Glaser.
Todd Glaser’s most expensive Palm Beach project changed hands in May, when a mansion he renovated and expanded fetched a recorded $150 million at 10 Tarpon Island. It was the sole residence on Palm Beach’s only private island, and the deal set a sale-price record for a lakefront property in town.