Posted on 05/06/2021 12:21:27 PM PDT by mylife
Whenever 30-year Dunedin resident John Tornga takes visitors on a tour of his quaint, coastal town, he makes sure to pass the home at 129 Buena Vista Drive S.
“It’s the only place anyone calls a ‘mansion’ in Dunedin,” said Tornga, a city commissioner. “There’s a mystique to it. Who else can say they have a Kellogg mansion in their city?”
The 7,600-square-foot, Mediterranean revival-ish home was built in 1925, and was then known as Villa Marino. W.K. Kellogg, founder of the Kellogg Company that revolutionized breakfast via ready-to-eat cereal, purchased it in 1934.
The interior is a wild mashup of styles and textures and colors. There is marble and velvet and crystal. There are tile mosaics of chariot races, stained-glass windows and hand-painted murals of the Taj Mahal.
A staircase to nowhere suggests it may have been designed by the notable architect Addison Mizner. The canopy bed is supposedly carved from trees from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The actor Sean Connery, it is believed, once bunked down in the guest house.
Soon it will likely all be torn down and replaced with a new home on the prime waterfront acreage overlooking St. Joseph Sound, just south of the Dunedin Causeway.
(Excerpt) Read more at tampabay.com ...
Unabashedly Opulent!........................ My kinda place!................
What a great place. I can’t wait to the the modern (read: cheap and gauche) replacement.
a horrible waste of history.
I find parts of the interior to be in questionable taste, but the outside is gorgeous. Can’t believe there isn’t some Karen in Tampa mandating it stay up for historical reasons and let them gut the inside.
I hope they put up one of the houses made up of cargo containers. That would be so brutalist! /sarc
Hopefully, somebody with money will want to step in and buy and preserve it.
The photos seem to indicate it is in good physical condition.
The Wenk family would be wise to hold off on their dream home until construction material prices go back to normal.
The Blue Jays could buy it for the price of a mediocre bench player and use it for whatever. Maybe hospitality or something to schmooze corporate types.
America is a wealthy country and there are tons of people who could tear that down and build a 50 million replacement.
If we can’t save “historical” history, how are we going to save building history. Once the statues go and the culture is cancelled, it’s over.
wiring, plumbing may all be issues in an old home
big time.
I would make it a tourist place
There is another Kellogg mansion in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. I stayed there for 6 weeks in training with an insurance company.
Although the interior furnishings of the one in Florida look better, the Massachusetts property had a nine-hole golf course, baseball field, and tennis courts. Much of the interior furnishings were gone but the house was still magnificent.
If I had the money and time, I would buy that place, and a boat, and burn everyday. Just sayin’
On my middle class Florida street, 205 and 305 have gotten new drain lines and 205, 304, and 305 have gotten new plumbing supply lines.
Typically PEX is used for new supply lines and PVC for new drain lines.
Drain lines can be relined instead of replaced.
Just like all the decent houses being bulldozed left and right just to build another house.
It’s too gaudy but could be fixed with a can of paint.
Bttt.
5.56mm
The owner is a complete idiot for wanting to destroy such a magnificent piece of architecture.
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