This is the Most Expensive House in All of Florida

There is an ongoing competition between Florida and Southern California for the most expensive home in the country. Florida is currently in second place, but the price of its most expensive home just got bumped up by $10 million for the asking price, creeping closer to So Cal’s top entry. The property is named Le Palais Royal and covers 60,000 square feet. The name translates to “The Royal Palace” (it’s French) and as the adage goes, a picture is worth 1,000 words. So we are going to let you peek in on some of the property’s more marketable features and add enough words to further enhance your fantasy home. Technically, real estate people call this a mansion but a home by any other name is still a home.

Yes, that is a yacht at the left side of this picture (above) and the requisite pier is to its right. Located near Fort Lauderdale in Hillsboro Beach, the current asking price for this French designed home tops out at $159 million. The “H” shaped structure above the yacht are the two guest homes if the owner has an overflow of guests. The requisite fountain is just in front of the main entrance. For the security conscious, it is safe to say that the home has the latest high tech security along with a security force, but the surrounding water is far better than a moat.

Those split staircases are made of white African marble and lead to a total of 17 bathrooms and 11 bedrooms, though it is not clear why there are more bathrooms than bedrooms. What you see hanging from the ceiling at the center of the picture is an Austrian crystal chandelier, with an age of 150 years and an estimated price of a cool $500,000. As we will see in other pictures, gold leaf finishes are common throughout the home. Those doors centered between the marble pillars lead to the outside – if you can find a reason to leave the home.

The kitchen has a name, and it is roomy enough for an entire family to move around comfortably while rummaging through the refrigerator for that late night snack. The “Le Cuisine du Chef” has Brazilian marble countertops and a Le Cornue range to prepare your meals on. For those unfamiliar with this French brand of kitchen appliances, they are among the most expensive in the world. We suspect the model in Le Palais Royal would be nothing less than the La Cornue Grand Palais Stove Range, priced at just under $48,000. The cabinetry is mahogany, and trimmed with the aforementioned gold leaf.

A swimming pool is a must have for any mansion, but especially in The Sunshine State. Everything in this home has a name, here it is Le Piscine (“The Pool”) its 4,500 total square footage is more than 1/16th the size of a soccer field. But soccer fields don’t have a 12 foot cascading waterfall or an LED waterslide. There are a total of 13 individual water features, and yes, some have the gold leaf design as a standard faire.

What would be modern luxury without the presence of an in-home Imax theater? True, this is one of the first residential Imax theatres built in the United States. But visuals are rather dull without a music production quality audio system to pair it up with and the stadium-style seating, which would be rude to simply call chairs. The owner will be able to see premiere films on the screen, but that comes with an extra cost.

What has been hidden from view are a go-kart track, ice skating rink, and nightclub, which leaves the impression that Le Palais Royal is more like an island than a place to live. As a matter of interest, all the French names of the various rooms are simply to add a French motif to potential buyers. It may sound more elegant to say le piscine than “the pool” but it is exactly the same thing.

The people most interested in buying La Palais Royal are not Floridians but New Yorkers, the very richest from the Middle Eastern countries, and a select group of Indians. It’s not likely a credit check is necessary once your identity is validated, and you have about $30 million in cash available as a 20 percent down payment. A random mortgage calculator places the monthly payments at about $1.450 million a month for a 10 year mortgage.