Tidbits and Morsels: Vincent Camuto

High end real estate watchers will recall that in July, 2013, (mid-priced) shoe tycoon Vincent Camuto and his wife and business partner, Louise, heaved and ho-d Wooldon Manor—an historic and completely rehabbed ocean front estate in Southampton, NY—on the open market with a blistering $48,000,000 asking price.

The folks at The Real Deal were the first to report, back in early October (2012), that the property had gone into contract with an unnamed buyer for an unknown amount. Now comes word via The Wall Street Journal that the buyers—still unnamed but revealed to be a couple from New York City—have arranged to purchase not only the 9,600-plus square foot English Tudor mansion and the 5.5-ish acre ocean front parcel it sits on but also a swathe of adjacent properties that ballooned the entire deal to more than 14 acres and swelled the agreed upon sales price to a sky-high and record-breaking $75,000,000.*

We won't take the time or expend the energy to recount the full history and scope of the property and the existing 7 bedroom and 12.5 bathroom mansion—we did that here, iffin yer interested—but suffice to say that a portion of the existing mansion was once the pool house for a spectacular and spectacularly huge, 50-room mansion built by a doctor turned stock broker and later owned by five-and-dime heiress Jessie Woolworth Donahue. The house was torn down by a subsequent owner in the early 1940s to reduce property tax bills.

Believe it or not, Mister and Miz Camuto own a second, equally epic if not ocean front estate in the Hamptons. In 2005 they shelled out $35,000,000 for the so-called Villa Marie, a 15-acre spread with a then-decrepit 21,000 square foot mansion that was long used as a religious and spiritual retreat and is (unappealingly) located on often jam-packed Montauk Highway at the edge of Water Mill's small downtown district. They renovated the entire estate to exacting and expensive standards and had it published for the world to ogle (and/or scoff) at in the glossy pages of Architectural Digest (July, 2013).

The Camuto's also own an also equally epic estate with an early 19th-century French Normandy chateau in über-upscale Greenwich, CT, and, although we have no specific intel, Your Mama would be shocked—shocked, we tell you—to learn they don't maintain a luxury pied-a-terre in one of Manhattan's more expensive zip codes. It also wouldn't surprise Your Mama to learn they had a place in Palm Beach and/or another in Aspen, and maybe even one someplace Alpine like France's Val d'Isere or Klosters in Switzerland. But we digress...

*According to local agents who chatted up the WSJ property gossips, a $75 million sale price would make it the highest price ever paid for a single family residence in the Hamptons.

listing photos: Sotheby's International Realty