Chicken Kitchen founder offering North Bay Road manse for $36M

Chicken Kitchen founder Christian de Berdouare is selling one of the three waterfront homes he has amassed on Miami Beach’s North Bay Road.

The yet-to-be-completed, newly constructed home at 5004 North Bay Road is on the market for $35.9 million.

Named  “Bakara Sesto Senso,” the resort-style mansion features seven bedrooms and 10 bathrooms, with a total living space of more than 17,000 square feet, including a nearly 3,500-square-foot, third floor, rooftop deck with infinity-edge pool, said de Berdouare.

Due to be finished in May, the home is being offered complete with custom-built Italian furnishings. Mirce Curkoski of One Sotheby’s International Realty has the listing.

“It’s really a one-of-a-kind home,” Curkoski said. “And whoever buys it will be very happy with the finishes and the quality and the flow of the house.”

De Berdouare bought his first home on North Bay Road in 1997, when he and his wife, TV journalist Jennifer Valoppi, purchased 5750 North Bay Road and moved in right after the birth of their first son, he said.

Rooftop pool

In September 2008, he bought 5004 for $3.1 million, property records show. His plans were to tear down the existing property and build a new mansion. De Berdouare, an architecture and design aficionado, said his goal was to live in the new home while tearing down and rebuilding his existing home at 5750 North Bay Road.

“We said, ‘Why don’t we buy 5004 as an investment, build a new house, live there, and once we build 5750 and finish it, we can move back to a new house,”‘ he said. “So that was the plan.”

In the meantime, de Berdouare was fortunate to sell a Chicken Kitchen property he owned on Miami’s Brickell Avenue to developer Ugo Colombo for $7 million. He used the proceeds from that to buy the house of the late, notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, at 5860 North Bay. He paid $9.8 million for it in May 2014.

“I bought that one because I didn’t know if I wanted to be at 5750 or 5860 for my own house,” de Berdouare said. “I’m still debating with my wife if we are going to live at 5750 or 5860.”

The newly listed home at 5004 North Bay Road was designed by architect Zeb Jarosz, who has designed homes for Dan Marino, Matt Damon and most recently, a 40,000-square-foot mansion for Michael Jordan in Jupiter. The home’s interior designer is New York-based Jennifer Post Design, and the landscape architect is Raymond Jungles, de Berdouare said.

“I have assembled a world-class team and built a pretty exceptional house,” he said. “It was never intended to be a spec house.”

Among the home’s features are two kitchens, two pools, an open atrium with a vertical garden, a private movie theater with seating for eight people, a wine room and a private gym. The master suite has a 9-foot by five-foot marble bathtub carved out of a single slab of Carrara Statuario marble, which weighs more than 6,000 pounds and required special structural engineering of the entire home. The home also has a six car garage.