Every day, about 700 people traipse through the elegant Cliff Hammock neighborhood of Miami to get a glimpse of Sylvester Stallone’s and Madonna’s homes.
“Mr. Stallone’s guards have been attacked, people have tried to scale the wall of his house; on many days, he has helicopters hovering over his house,” says Rosario Kennedy, Stallone’s representative in Florida.
Adds Cliff Hammock neighbor Alana Grajewski, “When you have someone who is a lightning rod for attention . . . it attracts a lot of crazies.”
Increasingly, household names are moving to the house next door. A generation ago, corporate titans were anonymous, all but a handful of professional athletes were middle-class and movie stars stayed in the company town of Hollywood.
Now, CEOs are celebrities. Every ballplayer is a millionaire. And between the end of the studio system, the growth of luxury travel, and earthquakes, actors are just as likely to set up housekeeping in Montana, Miami or Manhattan as they are in Malibu.
But the arrival of the high-profile homeowner, especially in the small, out-of-the-way enclaves where celebrities often take refuge, can mean problems.
Whether they intend to or not, celebrities–with their increased need for security, copious funds, manic fans, legal teams and tendency to build homes as big as stars’ egos–can make lousy neighbors. And now the lesser lights next door are fighting back.
Power forward Horace Grant made $17.9 million last year as a star of the Orlando Magic basketball team, but his idea of a home-sweet-home, doesn’t belong in Winter Park, Fla., according to neighbor Evelio de Hoyos.
Grant has been trying since October 1996 to build a 21,892-square-foot villa one lot over from de Hoyos’s 5,000-square-foot home.
The basketball player’s proposed house in one of Central Florida’s prettiest and oldest residential areas will be 40 feet high, include a six-car garage and a putting green, and will be shielded by an eight-foot security fence.
The house will ruin the neighborhood, says de Hoyos, who has filed a series of lawsuits against Grant and the City of Winter Park–which approved the plans–to prevent construction from proceeding.
“Horace’s house is five times the size of the average house in the neighborhood,” says de Hoyos. “The community will suffer. It’s going to affect the price of real estate, the tax base is going to increase. The house has to be in harmony with the rest of the community. You can’t build a palace here.”
Grant’s attorney, Bill Wilson, responds that the 21,892-foot figure is misleading. It factors in extra footage for the height of the house and includes the garage and the covered walkways.
Actually, “because the lot is so large and set so far back, the house is aesthetically far less obtrusive than most of the houses that you can find in Winter Park,” says the attorney. “It’s not this 21,000-square-foot monstrosity.”
Actor Mel Gibson infuriated some neighbors, too, when he put up a fence on his Greenwich, Conn., estate–and blocked part of a popular horseback-riding trail that cut through his sprawling property.
The town’s well-heeled equestrians, who don’t consider themselves in the same league as autograph-seeking riff-raff, were put off. Gibson’s spokesman declined to comment.
Walter Stratton, president of the Greenwich Riding and Trails Association, says that the actor “definitely has the right to keep people off his property.” But, he adds, the association is “an orderly group. There aren’t too many bad guys riding horseback in Greenwich these days.”
Famous homeowners not surprisingly feel they should be able to do with their property what any private homeowner is able to do–whether it be squabbling famously among themselves a la Martha Stewart and developer Harry Macklowe in East Hampton, N.Y., or making big plans for a community, and then not, a la Bruce Willis, who announced, then withdrew from, a development project in Penns Grove, N.J.
In 1994, Jackson Hole, Wyo., home to celebrities like Harrison Ford and his 800-acre ranch, passed a plan that limits house sizes to 10,000 square feet. It also restricts homeowners from altering the skyline or from substantially altering a building site, and seeks to preserve open space.
One of the first homes to be built after the plan was enacted belonged to performer Connie Stevens, who wanted to flatten out a tabletop site to build on, instead of conforming her house to the side of the mountain.
Teton County Planning Director Bill Collins was so concerned about the project he was going to deny a building permit “based on excessive alterations to the site,” he says. Architect Danny Eagan and Stevens, whose office didn’t return calls seeking comment, redesigned the plans to meet Collins’s criteria.
A dispute between Sony Music Entertainment Chief Executive Officer Thomas Mottola and his neighbors didn’t end as amicably. He has owned close to 745 acres of undeveloped land in Hillsdale, N.Y., since 1978. But when he started using an old road that connects his property with two of his neighbors’, he met with twin forces of nature: Barbara Horwitt and Rose De Houst, longtime residents of Hillsdale.
The women hired a worker to dig a 30-foot crater in the road, making it impassable for the trucks Mottola was using to remove timber and clear a building site.
“We’ve lived there for 50 years and he seemed to think he could walk over us and not pay any attention to our rights,” says Horwitt.
Mottola sued both neighbors for $200,000 apiece and won an injunction to keep them from further blocking the roadway. In a recent settlement, he was granted an easement to use the portions that belonged to them.
Mottola fumes: “I’ve owned that property for more than 20 years. I’ve protected the area by not building. There are other neighbors who know how hard I worked to protect the area.” Horwitt blames Mottola for the episode, calling him “arrogant.”
Back in Cliff Hammock, Stallone has so far escaped such venom. Perhaps that’s because he arranged for the city to erect a small gated fence at the end of the cul-de-sac that leads from his street to a pedestrian walkway. Members of the Cliff Hammock Homeowner’s Association were thrilled.
