The custom home built for golf pro and commentator Mark Lye in Naples, Florida, will head to the auction block next month.
Mr. Lye joins a number of athletes who’ve turned to luxury real estate auctioneers to sell their bespoke residences. The golfer is selling the five-bedroom home on the exclusive Talis Park golf course without reserve. It was most recently listed in May for around $2.9 million, according to listing records.
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It will sell to the highest bidder on Aug. 18 via Elite Auctions, which recently sold the home built down the road for another American golf pro, Rocco Mediate, for $2.5 million, according to property records.
The club was designed by golf champ Greg "The Shark" Norman and course designer Pete Dye, and is comprised of spacious plots featuring Spanish-style stucco-and-tile homes.
The community offers robust amenities suited for an older, avid golfer, but less practical for Mr. Lye’s young family, he told Mansion Global. He built the house in 2015 as a primary residence, but the commute to his children’s school was too onerous to justify living there.
"North Naples is great but it’s a little remote," said Mr. Lye, who played on the PGA tour for 18 years and now is a radio analyst for Sirius XM.
These days, the family lives in another home they custom built by the waterfront in East Naples, only a couple of miles from the main town, where Mr. Lye’s daughter acts in community theater and his son plays baseball.
The homes in Talis Park rely on a standard Mediterranean-inspired stucco and tile-roof design, but they range from modern transitional to more ornate, with Italian-inspired turrets and columned porticos, images of the neighborhood show.
Mr. Lye, 65, and his wife took a more contemporary approach to their Talis Park home. The single-story, white-stucco home is filled with modern finishes, including a slate-colored roof and shutters, images of the home show.
"It’s not over the top," Mr. Lye said.
They designed the home with communal spaces at its core, including a large great room open to the kitchen and dining room, and four bedrooms at each corner of the house, Mr. Lye explained.
"The great room-slash-kitchen-slash-dining room are the focal point of the whole house," he said. "We like a home with a great room, rather than having a living room that no one uses."
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Other details include a skylight and fireplace, a covered outdoor kitchen, 40-foot pool and plenty of lawn space on all sides of the home. There are also two, two-car garages and two home offices, which could be converted into bedrooms.
Over a year ago, the Lyes had an offer in hand for $2.9 million, but the buyer backed out about 15 days before the home was scheduled to close, the golfer said. After that, they took a soft approach to selling until their newest home was completed.
It was the auction of the Mr. Mediate’s former home down the road, which sold in May, that inspired Mr. Lye to hire Elite Auctions. Other athletes to send their homes to the auction block include former baseball stars Mark Teixeira, who put his Dallas home up for auction in May, and Cal Ripken, Jr., who auctioned off his Maryland home, also in May.
The auction of Mr. Lye’s house will be held on-site Aug. 18 at 11 a.m.