Sarasota Rising: Florida’s Low-Key Haven for High Design Heats Up

By David Hay
Something’s happening in Sarasota. It’s no longer that quiet, tucked-away spot you think you know but don’t really. (“It’s south of Tampa, isn’t it?”)

Time to wake up: Sarasota’s become one of the hotter real estate markets in Florida, if not the U.S.—particularly, at the luxury end.
“I’m getting clients calling from Malibu,” Douglas Elliman agent Mark J. Baron told me. “In fact, one recently bought this wonderful house on Longboat Key.”
Prices have always been relatively higher in Sarasota, but luxury property prices are currently soaring. According to John Forberger , Baron’s colleague in Elliman’s newly opened Sarasota office, there were 22 sales in Sarasota County at $5 million and above between the start of April and the end of June—a staggering 83% increase from last year. Sales of homes in the $5 million to $10 million range are up 60%. Entering the stratosphere, $10-million-plus home sales increased 100% (sure, it was only from three to six, but still).
“What’s happening is not a trend,” said Forberger. “It’s a total shift.”
Not that that this Gulf Coast town has been immune to the doldrums in the broader market over the last few years. “But we’ve been holding our own,” said Lisa Rooks Morris , another top Elliman agent in Sarasota. And the buzz from the boom at the higher end is filtering down.
Design-Forward Development
Part of the “shift” Forberger mentioned is how the market has begun to lure buyers from Florida’s East coast as well as from more traditional locales such as New York and the Midwest (and Malibu!).
With a cultural scene that many larger markets would be proud of (19 theaters!) and leisure activities that extend beyond such “Old Florida” gems as the British Course at the famed Bobby Jones Golf Club, Sarasota also checks the classic Sunshine State boxes, with its myriad, astonishingly beautiful and easily accessible beaches. Lido Beach, Siesta Beach, Zota and Whitney Beaches slightly to the north are all gorgeous, rarely crowded local treasures.

Mark J. Baron
John Forberger
Lisa Rooks Morris

When it comes to development, Sarasota plays it cool and smart, with new houses and condos that are extremely well-crafted and appointed. Thanks, perhaps, to clients from glitzy, higher-priced markets like the Hamptons, who have been through a redesign or two and haven’t hesitated to impart their fancy yet fastidious tastes to local contractors and designers, the high-end construction here in recent years has leaned into the best of contemporary design. Thus, many of these brand-new condos, especially in the downtown area, feature interiors and finishes that are instantly appealing to worldly buyers.
Epoch (Photo courtesy of Seward Development)
A prime example of these luxury prototypes—on par with anything on the market in Miami Beach—is the new Epoch development on Gulfstream Avenue, where Elliman’s Rooks Morris sold a spectacular condo for $11.35 million . The record-setting sale price surpassed the $11.15-million sale of the building’s penthouse a year earlier.
The Rosewood Residences , a luxury development nearing completion on Lido Key, are another standout. With a private beach club serving the owners of the 65 residences, the project is part resort, part simply spectacular living. Thanks to each apartment’s floor-to-ceiling windows, the views out to the horizon across the Gulf take your breath away. It’s a level of refinement and ease that perhaps only Sarasota can offer right now.
And given this is Florida, it should be noted that one of the very significant advantages of purchasing any of these newly built properties is that they are FEMA-compliant so as to mitigate the vicissitudes of climate change.
Mid-Century Mecca
As a smaller city with a population of 57,000 (nearly 750,000 when you account for the greater Sarasota-Bradenton area) Sarasota has furthered benefited from a local government careful to honor its past and, even more importantly, committed to preserve its now sought-after scale.
As such, it remains a rare bastion of mid-twentieth century living: easy to drive around, with ample beach-side housing, yet still quiet and personable. The hustle-bustle of dense urban life is sixty miles to the north in Tampa. And unlike coastal Florida’s many gated communities, Sarasota is decidedly open and vibrant.
Paul Rudolph's "Umbrella House" on Lido Shores.
Further, Sarasota has what other Florida cities never had: a fabled architectural history. Paul Rudolph, who later designed some of the most iconic examples of late Modernism (the Bass House in Fort Worth, the Yale School of Architecture), came here after World War II after graduating from Harvard. Full of such Modernist precepts as merging the exterior with the interior, opening up living spaces and using cheaper industrial materials, this young architect set about adapting them to Florida’s West Coast climate. Thanks to the preservation efforts of Architecture Sarasota, you can still visit his Umbrella House on Lido Shores, recognized by Architectural Digest as one of the most remarkable homes of the twentieth century. And the stunning 1960 addition to the Sarasota High School, more recently converted into the Sarasota Art Museum, is a joy to behold.
Rudolph’s designs turned the Lido Shores and the surrounding islands into a hotbed of mid-century modern architecture that now includes houses by Tim Seibert, Gene Leedy, Victor Lundy, Carl Abbott, William Rupp and Guy Peterson. And when these homes return to the market, they are highly sought after.
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“They’re works of art,” said Rooks Morris, “and thus appeal to a pretty sophisticated buyer.”
As luck would have it, she and Elliman agent Julie Guirguis represent the listing for 1331 Quail Drive , a later house designed by Jack Jetton, who began his career in Rudolph’s Sarasota office. Though relatively modest in scale at 2400 square feet, its design accentuates the continuity between its flowing interior and casual Florida exterior, thus making the home feel so much larger. It’s a remarkable testament to the work of these earlier visionaries.
This architectural history, however, left another, more subtle but more lasting legacy: the idea that living in a design-conscious, climate-friendly and luxurious way was not only possible in Sarasota but the reason you would come here. Happily, this ethos continues to infuse much of the new development, particularly in places such as Lido Shores, where the successors to those once avant-garde mid-century homes line the same stretches of land and face the same quiet but wondrous beaches.
Smart design has always had a home here in Sarasota—now more than ever, it seems.
David Hay is a well-known architectural writer and playwright. His stories have been featured in The New York Times , Dwell and New York .