A six-bedroom, 12,280-square-foot vintage lakefront mansion on 20.5 acres in Lake Geneva, Wis. sold on Friday for $17 million — the second-highest amount anyone ever has paid for a home in Lake Geneva.
A six-bedroom, 12,280-square-foot vintage lakefront mansion on 20.5 acres in Lake Geneva, Wis. sold on Friday for $17 million — the second-highest amount anyone ever has paid for a home in Lake Geneva.
The mansion, known as Villa Hortensia, sits next door to Lake Geneva’s highest-selling mansion in history, which is the 12-bedroom, 14,145-square-foot Glanworth Gardens mansion on 40 acres that Chicago-area billionaire J. Christopher Reyes and his wife, Anne, purchased for $36 million in January from the estate of the late investment manager Richard Driehaus.
Now, Villa Hortensia has sold in an off-market deal for the second-highest amount ever in Lake Geneva — although it was for a little less than half the record amount that Reyes paid for Glanworth Gardens. Built in 1906 and designed by architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, Villa Hortensia sold to a buyer who has not yet been identified publicly.
The sellers, Ralph and Sally MacDonald, bought the mansion in 1997 and first listed the mansion for $20.75 million in May 2021. They later had it for sale for $18.5 million before taking it off the market, and while it was off-market, real estate agent Wendy Murphy of d’aprile properties, who specializes in high-end sales in the Lake Geneva area, approached the MacDonalds with an offer from a client whose identity she would not share, and a deal was struck.
Other high-priced Lake Geneva-area sales include the $12.75 million sale last year of a 10-bedroom, 13,000-square-foot lakefront mansion to Thomas Tisbo, and the $13 million-plus spent by an Elmhurst woman to assemble previously cut-up condominiums in an Italian Renaissance-style lakefront mansion known as Stone Manor. However, Stone Manor’s units have not yet all been consolidated under her ownership.
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