Historic Washington, D.C., estate listed for $49 million

A Washington, D.C., estate, built when the capital was just a few years old, has gone on the market for $49 million, the city's most-expensive listing.

On a hill in Georgetown with views of the Washington Monument, the 12,000-square-foot Georgian-style mansion, on 3.58 acres, is called Evermay. In 1801, businessman Samuel Davidson commissioned the brick manor house as the seat of a 13-acre estate, and its original architecture has been preserved.

In 1923, diplomat Lammot Belin bought the mansion, landscaped the grounds, restored many original details and added two wings, which contain staff areas and a ballroom with Palladian windows. Belin's grandson is selling the house, which has eight bedrooms, six full baths and five half baths.

There's also a gatekeeper's house and a circa-1945 three-room staff house. The grounds include terraced gardens with six fountains and parking for 100 cars. The property is priced far above the city's current record sale: a house on 1.6 acres, also in Georgetown, that sold for roughly $25 million last year. Susie Maguire and Jeanne Livingston of Long & Foster Real Estate have the listing in association with Christie's Great Estates.

For sale: Museum of Modern Art exhibits

Exhibits don't usually go on sale after museum shows, but at least two of the prefabricated houses on display at New York's Museum of Modern Art are available for purchase. The buyer will have to pay for delivery.

MoMA commissioned five full-size homes for the exhibit Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, a survey of prefab housing that aims to show how computer modeling and environmental concerns have improved prefabricated design.

The Philadelphia architecture firm KieranTimberlake is seeking a minimum of $1.75 million for the Cellophane House, a four-story, two-bedroom aluminum and polycarbonate home with two walls of solar panels for the 1,800-square-foot structure. Buyers would need to finish the kitchen and add plumbing, says partner James Timberlake.

Also, architects Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier have listed their 1,000-square-foot Burst house for $475,000 with Stribling's Cyrilla Layland. The raised plywood house has a 600-square-foot porch and a glass wall. The exhibition ends this month.

Contractor buys in L.A.

In the biggest single-family home sale so far this year in Los Angeles, Ronald Tutor, chairman and chief executive of building contractor Perini Corp., paid $36.7 million for a massive, not-yet-completed house in the Beverly Park gated community.

The 27,000-square-foot Tuscan-style stucco home will have nine bedrooms, 18 bathrooms, a movie theater and a gym. The 3.55 acres include a pool, a tennis court and a guesthouse. Mauricio Umansky of Hilton & Hyland had the listing.

Tutor was the longtime chief of Tutor-Saliba, a closely held general contractor that's merged with Perini and whose projects include the Bay Area Rapid Transit-San Francisco International Airport extension. The seller was Lee Kort, an operating partner in California-based mobile-home-community operator Kort & Scott Financial Services, who paid $10.5 million for the vacant lot in 2005 and listed the house this spring for $49 million. Tracy Maltas of Sotheby's International Realty represented Tutor.

Beverly Park neighbors include Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone and Denzel Washington.

Listing by widow of Conde Nast's Florio

The widow of Steven T. Florio, the former CEO of Conde Nast Publications, has listed their waterfront Key Largo, Fla., vacation home for $8.9 million.

Florio presided over 16 magazines including Vogue, Architectural Digest and The New Yorker, until 2004 before he stepped down. He died in December at the age of 58.

The 9,000-square-foot, six-bedroom Mediterranean house - in Ocean Reef, a private club and community of about 4,000 acres - has eight full bathrooms, a billiard room, an elevator and a four-car garage. The property includes a pool and a dock with room for a 70-foot boat. Florio and his wife, Mariann, paid $4.8 million for the property in 2001. Russell Post of Sotheby's International Realty has the listing.