82 Bayshore Reach

The offering

A house built around one specific piece of water.

The lot came first. Camille walked it in 2017 with the original owner, a boat captain of thirty years who had bought it for one reason: from this stretch of the Davis Islands channel you can run to the Gulf without waiting on a bridge, at any tide, in anything up to a 55-foot hull.

Wren & Halloway spent eight months on the drawings and put the entire house on that axis. The approach is deliberately mute — a motor court eighty feet back from the road, twenty-two royal palms, a limestone wall that gives away nothing. You do not see the water until you are inside, and then you see nothing else.

The plan is a shallow L. The main volume runs 132 feet along the frontage and is only 34 feet deep, so every principal room takes the channel on one side and the courtyard on the other; there is no interior room in the house without natural light on two sides. The great room's bay elevation is 42 feet of glass in four pocketing panels, and when they are open the room and the terrace are one 2,100 square foot space with a limestone floor that runs through unbroken. The kitchen sits behind a 16-foot island of honed Calacatta with a second scullery kitchen behind it, which is the detail that sells this house to anyone who entertains seriously.

Upstairs, the cantilevered volume carries four bedroom suites and the primary, which occupies the west end and has its own terrace, an outdoor shower, and a dressing room that was drawn as a room rather than a corridor of closets. A clerestory 24 feet above the entry throws a single band of light across the white oak stair between four and five each afternoon — the east wing was oriented to catch it, and it is the one piece of theatre in an otherwise disciplined building.

Construction is what you would want on this water and rarely get: poured concrete to the second floor, impact glass throughout, a standing-seam metal roof, elevated 13.5 feet with the finished floor above base flood, and a whole-house generator with a 1,000-gallon propane tank. Insurance on it runs materially below comparable 1990s waterfront in the same zip code, and the elevation certificate is in the offering file.

Outside there is 126 feet of seawall, rebuilt with tie-backs in 2019 under the same permit as the house, a composite dock with a 16,000 lb lift, a 60-foot lap pool set parallel to the frontage, and an outdoor kitchen under the terrace overhang. Downtown sits directly across the channel; sunset puts the skyline in the pool.

It is a large house that does not behave like one. Two people can live in the west end and close the rest of it, which is precisely what the current owners do for nine months of the year.

• Price$8,950,000
• ArchitectWren & Halloway, 2019
• Interior8,400 sq ft
• Bedrooms6
• Bathrooms7.5
• Lot0.71 acre
• Frontage126′ seawall, tie-backs 2019
• WaterDeep water, no fixed bridges
• DockComposite, 16,000 lb lift
• Pool60′ lap pool, spa
• StructurePoured concrete, impact glass
• Elevation13.5′ finished floor
• Garaging4 bays, climate controlled
• ShowingsBy appointment, with a principal

Survey, elevation certificate, permit history, seawall engineering and the measured floor plan are released to qualified buyers on request.

Ask for the file→