Diana Ross Buys Miami House – DIRT
After six decades in show business (and usually enveloped in her signature cloud of hair), Diana Ross is still turning out tunes and electrifying audiences around the world. Last year she released her 25th album (“Thank You“), her first in 15 years, and earlier this year she released the feel-good single “Turn Up the Sunshine,” a collab with psychedelic pop band Tame Impala that was featured in the animated feature “Minions: The Rise of Gru.” As part of an international tour that culminated last month with half a dozen shows in Las Vegas, the former Supreme and superstar solo artist performed this summer in a beaded white kimono-style gown and a feathery fascinator to an eager sea of people at the Glastonbury Music Festival.
And with a swank new house to call home in Miami Beach, the glamour-puss Motown icon and showbiz legend, now 78, is also still dabbling in the high-end real estate game; tax records indicate the elegant and effervescent singer — nominated for a dozen Grammys but shockingly the winner of none — serves as the trustee for a vaguely named trust that plunked down $15.5 million for a striking waterfront contemporary home in the highly coveted Venetian Islands, a chain of low-lying artificial islands linked by a causeway in Biscayne Bay.
Built about five years ago and set on about one-quarter of an acre, the slightly more than 5,800-square-foot two-story home packs in five bedrooms and five bathrooms. The property was available through Shawn Frechette of One Sotheby’s International Realty, who also represented Miss Ross in the transaction.
Highlights of the ultra-modern abode include a sun-flooded double-height great room that spills out to an infinity-edge pool, and a sleek open-plan kitchen fitted with all the top-end culinary bells and whistles an amateur (or professional) chef could want. Each of the bedrooms boasts a private bath, while the main bedroom additionally offers a wall of glass that slides open to a private balcony along with a spa-style bath and a fitted walk-in closet larger than most studio apartments in South Beach.
There are gleaming white terrazzo floors throughout the house, which is controlled by state-of-the-art smart home technology, and numerous walls of glass that peel open to patios and terraces for an easy-going indoor-outdoor lifestyle. Accessed through a glass-walled pavilion, which the sellers used as an office, a vast rooftop terrace provides knock-your-socks-off 360-degree cross-bay views of the Miami skyline. And with sixty feet of bay frontage and a private dock, Miss Ross can park her boat in the backyard.
The “Chain Reaction” singer has long made her home at Quarry Farm, a stately 4-plus-acre waterfront spread with an 11-bedroom mansion that dates to the 1930s in the elite Belle Haven area of Greenwich, Connecticut. Her cross-country holdings also include a substantial three-story home with pool and tennis court located along a winding street just above L.A.’s Sunset Strip and another more modest dwelling across town in Venice.
