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The original Cielito Lindo was one of Palm Beach’s grandest palazzos. Built by Marion Sims Wyeth for heiress Jessie Woolworth Donahue, the mansion had 122 bedrooms and grounds that contained a tea pavilion, which is now for sale. (Courtesy Palm Beach County Historical Society)
It was the house built by a Woolworth, but Cielito Lindo in Palm Beach was no nickel and dime mansion.
And now a piece of it – the fabled estate’s former tea pavilion – is for sale for $5.3 million, reduced from $5.85 million. Paulette and Dana Koch of Corcoran Real Estate Group are the listing agents.
It gives us an opportunity to revisit one of the grandest estates built in those golden years between the wars when old money – and plenty of new – built fantasy castles on the Palm Beach sand.
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The living room of the former tea house of Cielito Lindo is a beachy blue-green. The 6-bedroom home is for sale for $5.3 million.(Courtesy Corcoran Real Estate Group)
Built in 1927 for Jessie Woolworth Donahue (the daughter of five-and-dime founder F.W. Woolworth), the original 45,000-square foot Cielito Lindo contained 122 bedrooms, sequestered on a 16-acre estate that stretched from the ocean to the Intracoastal.
Society architect Marion Sims Wyeth designed the house in a Moorish style with Moroccan-style brickwork and wooden window grills on land just north of Marjorie Merriweather Post’s (now Donald Trump’s) Mar-a-Lago.
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Moorish brickwork decorates the largest of Cielito Lindo’s remaining buildings. (This is not the tea house.) (Post file photo)
For 20 years, Cielito Lindo reigned as one of the Jazz Age resort’s most magnificent sand castles. On its grounds sprawled orange groves, tennis courts, a lily pond, boat houses and exotic gardens and the tea pavilion, which is now a 5,415-square-foot, 6-bedroom home.
The Donahues threw gigantic parties at their estate, where they lavishly entertained the celebrities of the day such as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Florenz Ziegfeld.
But when the palazzo age ended in Palm Beach (along with much of Donahue’s fortune) the house whose name translates as “Little Bit of Heaven” was subdivided.
In the late 1940’s, the estate – then viewed as one more gigantic white elephant – was carved up into five homes when a developer razed the living room to blaze Kings Road through the property.
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Interior columns grace the interior of the estate’s largest remaining building. (The tea house is further west on Kings Road.) (Post file photo)
One of those is the tea pavilion which could also have housed some of the staff required to service the large estates built in the 1920s in Palm Beach.
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The tea house’s family room has been renovated in a modern beach house style. (Courtesy Corcoran Real Estate Group)
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The pool area of the former tea pavilion harkens back to Palm Beach’s sandcastle era. (Courtesy Corcoran Real Estate Group)
Renovated in 2014 by two friends, the house today is a light, bright beach house decorated in the watery colors of the Palm Beach sky and ocean.
Read more about the renovation of the tea house here.
Image may be NSFW.
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