House at 1010 N. Lake Way was the longtime home of the late Betty Jane Fisher and her late husband, auto-parts mogul Alfred Joseph Fisher Jr. It sold to a trust, the deed shows.
Darrell HofheinzPalm Beach Daily News
Owned by the Fisher family since it was built in the late 1970s, a lakefront house on the North End of Palm Beach has sold for about $27 million, courthouse records show.
The five-bedroom house occupies a half-acre lot with about 110 feet of deep-water frontage at 1010 N. Lake Way. With a dock in the waterway, the house has two levels and 5,088 square feet of living space, inside and out.
A trust named after the property’s address was on the buyer’s side of the sale, the deed recorded Monday shows. Estate-planning attorney Stephanie E. Heilborn, a partner at Proskauer Rose in New York City, serves as trustee. She could not be immediately reached for comment. Because of privacy rules governing trusts, no other information about the buyer was immediately available in public records.
The house was for years the home of the late Betty Jane Fisher, who died at 100 in November 2022, and her late husband, Alfred J. “A.J.” Fisher Jr., who died in 2012 at 91. He co-founded, founded and ran several Detroit auto-parts manufacturing companies, including Alrowa Metal Co., General Safety Corp. and Fisher Dynamics Corp.
The Fishers bought the property for $850,000 in 1977, the year the house was completed, property records show.
The price recorded with the deed for the sale that closed June 14 was $27.063 million.
The deed shows the seller to be Alfred J. Fisher III, one of the Fishers’ four children, who acted as trustee of a trust in his name and of trusts in his siblings' names — Judith Fisher Knudson, Christine Fisher Grow and Michael R. Fisher.The mailing address for the trusts is in care of attorney Grace K. Trueman of Honigman LLP in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
The Fisher siblings and Honigman could not be immediately reached for comment.
The late Fishers had Michigan ties to Grosse Pointe and Harbor Springs, but the Palm Beach house had been their primary residence, according to property records.
The property is familiar to many drivers on North Lake Way because of the four sizable topiary trees — trimmed to resemble lollipops — planted between the two driveway entrances. The house stands near the intersection of Garden Road and North Lake Way.
Broker Lawrence Moens of Lawrence A. Moens Associates had acquired the listing in early March and priced the property at $31.5 million, the multiple listing service shows.
On the buyer’s side was broker Christian Angle of Christian Angle Real Estate. Angle declined to comment about the sale, and Moens could not be reached.
The property had been listed at $38 million in early January 2023 by another agency, although that price eventually dropped to $34.5 million, acording to MLS records.
The house was built by the late developer Robert Gottfried. The architecture reflects his signature Palm Beach Regency style, with a crisp silhouette and classical elements, including decorative urns at the roofline.
Photographs of the interiors show clean-lined rooms with high ceilings that look out to the lakefront swimming pool and the dock. On the opposite side of the waterway, the view includes yachts anchored at the Safe Harbor Rybovich Marina in Riviera Beach.
The interior layout also includes an eat-in kitchen with a work island, a paneled library with a fireplace, a formal dining room, and a two-car garage.
The sale is one of five lakefront properties to sell in Palm Beach since the beginning of May. Those deals included: anewly renovated and expanded mansion at 10 Tarpon Island, the town’s only private island, which changed hands for a recorded $150 million; a vacant lakefront lot at 940 N. Lake Way, which sold for a recorded $50 million; a 1987 lakefront housewith aguesthouse at 315 Chapel Hill Road, which fetched a recorded $49.6 million; and a lakefront estate built in 2007 at 10 Via Vizcaya, which sold for a recorded $39 million.
The MLS shows two other Palm Beach lakefront houses are under contract: An extensively renovated home with an asking price of $57.85 million at 200 Via Palma in the Estate Section; and a never-lived in house at 584 Island Drive on Everglades Island with an asking price of $34 million.
Darrell Hofheinz is aUSA TODAY Network of Florida journalist who writes about Palm Beach real estate in his weekly “Beyond the Hedges” column. He welcomes tipsabout real estate news on the island. Email dhofheinz@pbdailynews.com, call 561-820-3831 or tweet @PBDN_Hofheinz.
