From Nixon’s secret retreat to Hollywood’s most iconic crime den, this Key Biscayne waterfront estate has been hiding in plain sight for decades. Now, for the first time in over twenty years, you can own it — if you have $237 million to spare.
There are houses. There are mansions. And then there is 485 West Matheson Drive.
Sitting on the sun-drenched shoreline of Key Biscayne, Florida, a bright white compound rises from the edge of Biscayne Bay like something out of a fever dream — part presidential retreat, part Hollywood legend, part trophy that the ultra-wealthy elite of Miami have been quietly circling for years. This week, the gates finally opened. The estate that gave Scarface its soul has been listed for sale at $237 million, a figure so audacious it would shatter every residential sales record in Miami-Dade County history.
This is not just a house going on the market. This is an event.
The Day a President Claimed It
Wind the clock back to 1969. Richard Nixon had just taken the most powerful office in the world, and he needed somewhere to escape it. He found his answer on Key Biscayne — a sliver of island paradise just a short helicopter ride from the chaos of Washington — and he claimed this waterfront compound as his own private sanctuary, officially designating it the Winter White House.
For the next five years, this stretch of bayfront land was among the most consequential addresses on the planet. World leaders arrived by helicopter, touching down on a massive concrete platform that jutted into Biscayne Bay like an outstretched hand. Henry Kissinger walked the grounds. Diplomatic deals were quietly brokered over the sound of water lapping against the shore. The weight of history settled into the soil here, and it never quite left.
Nixon eventually fell from grace. The bungalow he had called his retreat was later torn down, and the compound changed hands. But the helipad — that great concrete stage built for Marine One — remained. It is still there today, extending boldly into the bay, as if still waiting for someone important to land.
Photo Credit: JILL EBER/JUDY ZEDER/1 OAK STUDIOS
The Pilot, the Cartel, and the Birth of a Legend
In the early 1980s, a Cuban-born pilot named Roberto Striedinger acquired the land and built the home that stands on it today. He had big vision. He constructed a sprawling postmodern masterpiece: bright white walls, marble floors that seemed to stretch to the horizon, ceilings that soared seven meters overhead, and at the very heart of it all, a semicircular elevator of stainless steel and glass — an architectural statement so dramatic it seemed designed for an audience.
As it turned out, it was.
Striedinger was later convicted of running cocaine shipments for the Medellín drug cartel. His gleaming waterfront palace was seized by the government and sold. And a few years before all of that unraveled, a film crew from Hollywood had knocked on his door and asked if they could use his home in a little movie they were making.
The movie was Scarface. The year was 1983. And the home was never quite ordinary again.
Tony Montana Walked Through That Door
When director Brian De Palma set out to build the world of Scarface, he needed a home that could belong to a man of dangerous wealth and dangerous taste. The Key Biscayne estate answered in every possible way.
On screen, it became the lair of Frank Lopez — the Cuban crime boss whose empire a young, burning Tony Montana would stop at nothing to claim. It is at this house that Tony first arrives, hat in hand, calculating everything behind those hungry eyes. It is here that he first encounters Elvira, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, descending in that extraordinary glass elevator in a moment that audiences have never forgotten. And it is here, finally, where Tony’s ruthlessness fully reveals itself, and the story turns irrevocably dark.
Four decades have passed since those cameras rolled. The glass elevator still works. The marble floors still catch the light exactly the way they did when Pacino’s shadow crossed them. The original wall-mounted toilets — pressed in vivid shades of green, orange, and yellow that belong unmistakably to a specific, glorious decade — remain in place, untouched, a detail so specific it can only exist in a house where preservation has been treated as a form of respect.
The estate went on to appear in Miami Vice, deepening its status as one of the most visually iconic private residences ever put on screen.
Photo Credit: JILL EBER/JUDY ZEDER/1 OAK STUDIOS
The Man Who Landed and Stayed
In 2003, a Miami-based investor named John Devaney was somewhere above Biscayne Bay in the middle of a helicopter lesson when he looked down and saw the helipad. He had recently acquired a Sikorsky S-76 helicopter — along with a $22 million yacht and a private jet — and the sight of that enormous concrete platform stretching into the bay below him was, to put it simply, irresistible.
He descended. He knocked on the door. And he made an offer.
Fifteen million dollars secured the main property. Another fifteen million bought the surrounding parcels. For thirty million dollars, John Devaney became the custodian of one of the most layered, storied pieces of real estate in America. He moved in with his family in 2007, and for the years that followed, he took deliberate care to leave the home’s character exactly as he found it. No gut renovations. No erasure of what came before. Just a quiet, intentional stewardship of something irreplaceable.
Now his children are grown. The world is calling. And he has decided that someone else should have their turn.
What You Get for $237 Million
The estate sprawls across 2.4 acres of prime Key Biscayne waterfront, wrapping nearly 900 feet of Biscayne Bay frontage around itself like a crown. The views across the water toward the Miami skyline are unobstructed and, at certain hours of the evening, genuinely breathtaking.
The main house runs to approximately 13,000 square feet across three levels. The primary living floor opens through floor-to-ceiling glass — the bay always visible, always present — onto marble floors that run from room to room beneath those towering ceilings. A kitchen fitted with metal surfaces and rich teak detailing anchors one end of the floor. The iconic glass elevator anchors the other. Upstairs, three bedrooms and a primary suite with a private office and sweeping walk-in closets make up the upper level. Below, a lower floor of more than 7,000 square feet houses a music studio, a game room, staff quarters, and storage on a scale that feels more like a private club than a basement.
Five bedrooms. Seven full bathrooms. Two half-baths.
Outside, a piano-shaped swimming pool curves along the waterfront in a gesture of architectural playfulness that somehow suits the home perfectly. Over five hundred landscape lights are woven through the grounds, transforming the estate after dark into something luminous and theatrical. The old presidential helipad now functions as a private marina capable of receiving yachts up to 200 feet in length, with deeded control over more than 34,000 square feet of the adjacent bay floor extending the estate’s reach beneath the waterline.
It is, in every measurable sense, extraordinary.
Photo Credit: JILL EBER/JUDY ZEDER/1 OAK STUDIOS
Why This Moment Matters
Miami’s luxury real estate market has been rewriting its own record books at a pace that would have seemed fantastical just a few years ago. Earlier in 2026, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg paid $170 million for a compound on nearby Indian Creek Island — a deal that reset the ceiling for Miami-Dade County residential sales and announced, loudly, that South Florida had arrived at the very top of the global property market.
If 485 West Matheson Drive sells anywhere near its $237 million asking price, that ceiling gets shattered again. Eight of the ten largest residential listings currently active in the United States are in Florida. The money is here. The buyers are here. And now, so is the most compelling property any of them will ever be offered.
“There are lots of guys looking,” Devaney has said with the calm of a man who understands exactly what he is holding. “Let someone else take a turn.”
A House That Cannot Be Repeated
What makes this moment genuinely rare is not the size of the number attached to it, remarkable as that is. It is the simple, inarguable fact that this property cannot be recreated, replicated, or replaced.
You cannot build a new Nixon retreat. You cannot manufacture forty years of cinematic mythology. You cannot fabricate the kind of layered, lived-in history that makes a building feel like it belongs to the world rather than to any single person who happens to hold the deed.
The glass elevator is still there. The bay still shimmers outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. The helipad still reaches into the water. And the house at 485 West Matheson Drive — presidential compound, Hollywood set, waterfront sanctuary, record-breaking listing — is available right now, today, for the first time in more than two decades.
Somewhere on Biscayne Bay, a door is open. The question is simply who is going to walk through it.
485 West Matheson Drive, Key Biscayne, FL — Listed at $237,000,000. Listing agents: Jill Eber and Judy Zeder, Jills Zeder Group, Coldwell Banker.
