A local senior health care executive and his interior designer spouse paid $3 million in late April for the property that neighbors their historic home facing Lake Maitland, on Winter Park’s Via Lugano, where they may build a new guest house and swimming pool.
Set in the 500 block of Via Lugano, the 0.5-acre lakefront parcel includes a four-bedroom, three-and-a-half bath home built in 1967 with 4,012 square feet of conditioned area.
The buyers were Joseph D. Conte and Lynn F. Conte.
Joseph is the co-founder and former chief executive officer of Consulate Health Care, one of the country’s leading providers of senior health care services. Lynn had her own local interior design business, Lynn Conte Designs. Both are recently retired.
“We will probably do a pool there and a guest house,” Lynn told GrowthSpotter on Friday. “We haven’t decided yet if we will fully demo the home, maybe a partial demo.”
The sellers were Dr. Leslie A. Morgan, who maintained a family medicine practice in Winter Park, and wife Reta S. Morgan.
The property neighbor’s the Conte’s historic home on Via Lugano, which was built in 1928 and boasts seven bedrooms, eight baths and 9,793 square feet of conditioned area across two floors. The couple bought that 0.83-acre lot and home for $875,000 in 1996.
The Conte’s main home is a Venetian-style villa designed by architect George Keiser, who was inspired by work restoring historic landmarks in Venice, Italy in the early 1920s. The home was originally built to stand on Lake Maitland, and has a series of dry canals underneath it, according to a 1997 report by the Orlando Sentinel.
Slocum Platts Architects was brought in by the Contes to renovate the home after the 1996 acquisition. It included converting the garage into a master suite, building a detached garage and enclosing a courtyard to make a living room.
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