This Northern Virginia estate just shattered a DC-area price record

The Virginia estate of late AOL co-founder James Kimsey sold for $45 million, a record for the Washington, D.C. area.

The three-acre property listed in 2018 for $63 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. The property sits on the Potomac River and includes two homes — a 24,500-square-foot house that Kimsey built and the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Marden House built in the late 1950s.

The sale breaks a record set in 2018 when Kimsey’s AOL co-founder Steve Case sold the nearby childhood home of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for $43 million to the Saudi Arabian government.

Kimsey bought the main property in 1999 for around $7.6 million and a year later bought the neighboring Marden House property for $2.5 million because he “didn’t want to see someone tear it down,” according to his son, Mark Kimsey. The Wright home measures in around 3,100 square feet and was used as a guest house.

The six-bedroom main home is set up for entertaining. It has four kitchens and a loading dock for catering trucks, one garage for the owner and a guest garage that can fit around 30 cars. There’s also a wine room and a champagne refrigerator. There’s also a guard house with three bedrooms. The grounds include a pool and a tennis court.

Kimsey’s involvement with AOL started in the early 1980s as a consultant with the company’s predecessor. He was chairman of AOL from its organization under that name until retiring about a decade later in 1995. He was born in Washington, D.C. and had built a series of successful bars in the area before his time with AOL. He died in 2016.

Elsewhere in the Beltway, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is renovating his $23 million compound in D.C. Bezos recently held a lavish party at the renovated home, which was formerly the old Textile Museum in Kalorama. The total cost is about $40 million, though there have been months of delays with permits.

[WSJ] – Dennis Lynch