Got $30M to Spare? A Historic Miami Vice House in Coconut Grove Is for Sale

The two coolest things about the internet are 1) it allows you to dig up dang near any morsel of information you're curious about, no matter how arcane, and 2) when you start stomping your figurative shovel into the fertile virtual soil, chances are someone's already struck gold, excavated a mineshaft, shored it up, and illuminated it for your wonder and merriment.

Such was the case in early April when a colleague alerted us that a gorgeous old Coconut Grove house was recently listed for sale for $29.9 million.

You see, Miami real estate is something of a passion for us at New Times.

The big tease, though, was the mention of Miami Vice in headlines touting the listing for the home at 3467 N. Moorings Way, which dates to 1925 and was designed by famed architect Walter DeGarmo. (We'll get to him later.)

Take "Coastal Mansion Featured on 'Miami Vice' Breezes Onto the Market for $29.9M" from realtor.com, which reveals itself to be a mere rearranging of the sale listing, with nary a mention of the iconic NBC television series that ran from 1984 till 1989 and was mostly shot on location in and around Miami.
And this Maxim story, "Inside a $30 Million South Florida Mansion Featured in 'Miami Vice,'" was nearly as unhelpful — though it does deign to tease (parenthetically), "keep an eye out for the house in the show’s fifth season."

Thanks for nothing!

Which brings us to an awesome forum, miamiviceonline.com, and a pair of Austrian nationals, Thomas Foltyn and Tom Seifert, obsessive students of Miami Vice and the pastel-hued world of 1980s Miami in which Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs fought the War on Drugs and battled their own existential demons, often simultaneously.

Archival Location Scouting With Thomas Foltyn and Tom Seifert

Foltyn and Seifert were happy to describe their search strategy when New Times tracked them down.

Simply put, the effort requires diligence, determination, and access to archival resources — the last of which include production notes from the show, the publicly accessible Miami-Dade Property Search page, and HistoricAerials, a privately run site that contains searchable aerial maps dating back to the mid-20th Century. Familiarity with the local landscape as it looked in the 1980s doesn't hurt, either.

Foltyn possesses all of the above.

"Vienna was dull and gray and at the iron curtain, and Miami Vice changed my life."

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"Miami Vice started in my country on TV in late '86 and I got hooked," he explains. "Vienna was dull and gray and at the Iron Curtain, and Miami Vice changed my life."

In the early 1990s, Foltyn studied abroad at the University of Miami, living near 22nd Street in Miami Beach during an era when "Wolfie's, the Sasson Hotel, Club Nu, and the Gayety Burlesque were there, and everything still looked like in the mid-'80s," he remembers, adding ruefully, "Then the condo builders took over."

He began hunting down locations more than 20 years ago after he finished annotating the music used in the series. He's currently putting the finishing touches on the 11th edition of his exhaustively researched Unauthorized "Miami Vice" Episode Guide (available for purchase online).

Perhaps not surprisingly, he and Seifert find it hard to sum up the method by which he and Seifert do their "location scouting." Foltyn characterizes it as a "very methodical approach, doing lots of stills — I use the German BluRays, as they are newly encoded and have the best-detailed picture of the original 35mm film. Then we analyze everything from sun angle in outdoor scenes to reflections in mirrors, background, main power lines (which run north-south in most of Miami-Dade, etc.) to develop a search pattern. The key is to narrow it down to a very small haystack to find the needle."

"When you find a location after hours of staring at blurry black-and-white aerials, it's a moment of pure satisfaction."

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It may be no coincidence that he and Seifert both work in IT. They and their fellow sleuths have teamed up to nail down more than a thousand needles.

"We achieved perfection when the pandemic broke with lots of time and nowhere to go," Foltyn elaborates. "The average find time was one to two weeks, but some tough nuts we searched for years. We have only five locations left to find."

"In the Jack Reacher series on Amazon, he always says, 'In an investigation, every detail counts!' Fully agree!" Foltyn notes. "I found the unknown horse farm in 'One Way Ticket' through the name of the horse on the stable door and a reverse check with the breeder's name. I even found a picture of the horse. Or a few months ago, the interior scene in 'Little Prince' through the phone closeup where the number was on the phone," which he was able to match via a contemporaneous New York Times travel story to the famed (and since demolished) Key Biscayne Hotel and Villas. "I love finding things that other people deem impossible, although all intel is there to find if you look properly!"

Adds Seifert, a Vienna-born father of two who now lives in Switzerland, "When you actually find a location after hours of hurting your eyes by staring at blurry black-and-white aerials, it's a moment of pure satisfaction, so you can quickly get hooked on it. You gotta have the eye for that and be able to fully focus and concentrate on something. To me, in our hectic world, it’s almost some kind of meditation."

"Kinda 'mental sanity maintenance,' as Crockett would say," Foltyn quips.

When Was 3467 N. Moorings Way Featured in Miami Vice?

3467 N. Moorings Way, colloquially known as Villa Serenita, appears in two separate episodes of Miami Vice. The first was "Rites of Passage" (season 1, episode 15), in the guise of a drug-treatment clinic. Principal photography for that episode was shot January 14-23, 1985, and the show aired on February 8. The other cameo came in "Miami Squeeze" (season 5, episode 11), as the residence of British drug dealer Sebastian Ross (principal photography January 5-13, 1989; first aired February 17).

After years of fruitlessly searching, Seifert hit the jackpot in June 2020, when he matched scenes from "Miami Squeeze" with photos from a recently expired real estate listing for the North Moorings Way property.

"The Moorings Way house was actually one of the quickest finds I had — a lucky punch," he recounts. "Did a photo search on Google for "Spanish revival Miami," scrolled through the results for five minutes, and there it was. Took another few minutes to confirm it with real estate ads [archived], and that was it."
More than a year would pass before Foltyn was able to match Villa Serenita with the "Rites of Passage" episode, using a set of photos from a newer real estate listing for the property [archived].
"Gotcha! The last mystery of ['Rites of Passage'], the clinic, is solved!" Foltyn posted, explaining that "it flashed [on] me immediately when I saw the stair railings in 'Miami Squeeze' that are identical. I knew that the unique railings and column patterns exist only once. They did a nice job to dress a private home as a clinic. It was once pink and is now more beige, but otherwise no big changes. Same doors, same floor, same garden...."

La Serenita Isn't the Only Walter DeGarmo Home Featured in Miami Vice

La Serenita is located in a posh, gated corner of Coconut Grove on the bay side of Main Highway. Built in 1925 at 3467 N. Moorings Way, it commands a view of Biscayne Bay by way of a short, manmade cut lined with boat docks facing southeast.

Pro tip: That's what an architect might call thoughtful orientation.
It should come as no surprise, then, that La Serenita's architect, Walter DeGarmo, was responsible for many other Miami landmarks constructed during the first three decades of the 20th Century.

Armed with degrees in civil engineering and architecture, he came to Miami in 1903 and made his mark in concrete form. Considered to be the area's first registered architect, DeGarmo was, in architectural parlance, a big cheese, responsible for building Miami's City Hall, police station, and several fire stations; the McAllister Hotel (the city's tallest building at the time); the Coconut Grove Bank; and the Coral Gables Administration Building as well as its post office.

However, as Margot Ammidown, former director of Miami-Dade County's Historic Preservation Office, noted in a 1984 profile, DeGarmo's heart was in residential real estate — specifically the Mediterranean Revival style that was so well-suited to South Florida's environs.

Writes Ammidown:

Along with work, financial success came to Walter DeGarmo in the 1920s. He was able to build a dream house for himself, wife Mary. and three children: a large Mediterranean home which remains on Douglas Road in Coconut Grove. The family lived in this house for most of the year and during the summer moved to a two-story red brick beach house of French Influence that he built on Miami Beach at Eighth and Ocean.

During the Depression DeGarmo lost the family dream house for taxes, but he was eventually able to bulld another house nearby as business slowly picked up in the late 1930s.

Walter DeGarmo never sacrificed his reputation to "get rich quick" by building cheaply like many of his contemporaries, so as the economy improved people who wanted a nice home came looking for him.

But DeGarmo's heyday ended with the 1920s. He was not a fan of Modern architecture. He thought the materials were frequently shoddy, and that the buildings themselves were almost always unattractive, designed for factory rather than human considerations.

In 1924, DeGarmo built 27 Star Island Drive on 86 acres of manmade fill just north of what's now the MacArthur Causeway. The house was featured in "Victims of Circumstance" (season 5, episode 16). A comparatively small abode by modern standards, it was the first home constructed on what is said to be the priciest and most exclusive enclave in the U.S. Today, it's a veritable speck on the property, thanks to a dental-products tycoon who paid $10.75 million for it in 2011. He extravagantly remodeled it and surrounded it with a 20,000-square-foot ultramodern manse, which he sold in 2023 for $57 million — $33 million less than his original asking price. The real estate listing for the Frankensteinian creation invited prospective buyers to "step in time to a Walter DeGarmo 1920s guest house reimagined to the highest standards." Photos of the DeGarmo house as it looked during Miami Vice shooting in 1989 are preserved for posterity on miamiviceonline.com.
DeGarmo also built 42 Star Island Dr., a stunning, sun-splashed structure featured in the aforementioned "Little Prince" episode during season 1. (It was also Tony Montana's house in Scarface.) Though it was built the same year as its cousin on North Moorings Way, 42 Star Island suffered an ignominious demise after it was purchased out of foreclosure in 2012 by plastic surgeon Leonard M. "Lenny" Hochstein (AKA "Boob God") and his wife Lisa — you might remember them from Real Housewives of Miami. To the dismay of local preservationists, they tore it down and built this. (Then they split up.)

Seifert grows incensed at the demise of so many "stunningly elegant" DeGarmo creations. "Especially 42 Star Island," he fumes. "Just to be replaced with some abomination for a reality TV celeb to flex with."

On a less dire note, the architect's personal residence at the intersection of Douglas Road and Main Highway was used twice — in "Rock and a Hard Place" (season 4, episode 11) and again in "Over the Line" (season 5, episode 15). The site was later divided and rechristened DeGarmo Estates, a private, gated community. According to an archived version of the DeGarmo Estates website, the original home at 3952 Douglas Road has been "carefully and beautifully restored. In 1993, developers built nine new homes within the walls of the DeGarmo estate. It has since become a very private and exclusive community. The new construction homes maintained the Mediterranean style that DeGarmo was famous for."

Don't look for 3952 Douglas Rd. on a present-day map, though — the new address is 3710 De Garmo Ln.