As Seen In The Wall Street Journal
By Sarah PaynterFollow
May 9, 2023 2:36 pm ET
A Florida home on the beach with an open-air “man cave” is listing for $18 million, according to listing agent Marilyn Carson of Corcoran Reverie.
The six-bedroom, roughly 6,400-square-foot home is located in Santa Rosa Beach off Scenic Highway 30A, roughly 40 miles west of Panama City, Ms. Carson said.
The sellers are energy executive Bill Lang and his wife, Marie Lang, who owns an event venue outside Houston. The couple bought the house for $3.4 million as a vacation home in 2016, when they were living in Texas, Ms. Lang said, but decided to make it their primary home in 2019 after completing a renovation.
The roughly 0.7-acre lot has about 65 feet of frontage on the Gulf of Mexico and a private beach. There is also a pool and a three-car garage with a two-bedroom guest apartment, said Ms. Carson.
The Langs hired Ms. Lang’s daughter Bridget Santos, a Dallas-based interior designer, to renovate the home at a cost of about $2 million. Their additions included a “bunk room” with four queen-size beds and two full-size beds, each with its own television, so their grandchildren can watch their own shows while wearing headphones, said Ms. Lang. They also added the man cave, which has a kitchen, lounge area and swing chairs. Mr. Lang uses it to watch college football, grill ribs, and host crawfish boils, his wife said.
The revamp also increased the size of the living room, finished the pool deck in quartzite, and installed a laundry room on every floor for convenience, said Ms. Lang. The home, which is being sold furnished, also has an office, an elevator and a living room with a fireplace and a wet bar, said Ms. Carson.
The Florida Panhandle was hard hit by 2018’s Hurricane Michael, and while the Langs’ under-construction home wasn’t damaged by the storm, roughly $300,000 worth of furnishings in a Panama City storage facility were destroyed and had to be reordered, Ms. Santos said.
While living in the house, the Langs entertained friends and family and spent time at the beach, Ms. Lang said, but they have decided to downsize in order to travel.
Mr. Lang retired from Constellation, a Maryland-based clean-energy company, in 2020. Ms. Lang founded her wedding and event venue, Magnolia Bells, in the mid-2010s.
The median sales price in the Scenic Highway 30A area was $1.4 million in the first quarter, the same price as last year, according to data from Corcoran Reverie. The area saw dramatic price growth at the beginning of the pandemic, said Ms. Carson, who said the area primarily draws buyers from the South, especially Atlanta and Nashville, Tenn.
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