Beyond the Hedges: Dunbar Road house sells for $2.3M

In May 2011, Butch and Melinda Trucks sold this six-bedroom house in the ocean block of Dunbar Road for a recorded $2 million to an entity controlled by E. Llwyd Ecclestone Jr. The house just changed hands for $2.3 million.

An Ohio doctor has paid a recorded $2.3 million for the Mediterranean-style house at 171 Dunbar Road once owned by Allman Brothers drummer Butch Trucks and his wife, Melinda.

Dr. Thomas E. Mandat of Brecksville, a Cleveland suburb, bought the house through a limited liability company from another LLC controlled by Palm Beach developer E. Llwyd Ecclestone Jr.

Built in 1954, the six-bedroom house has 5,581 square feet of living space, inside and out, according to property records. Ecclestone’s ownership company, VA Housing LLC, bought the house from the Truckses for a recorded $2 million in May 2011 and then updated the kitchen before putting it back onto the market. The Truckses had owned the property at the corner of North County Road for more than a decade.

The house was unoccupied when it sold, says agent Bill Yahn of the Corcoran Group, who had listed it at $2.695 million. Christian Angle of Christian Angle Real Estate represented the buyer’s Ohio ownership company, Olde Eight Development LLC. Angle said he had no comment on the sale.

Mandat owns no other property in Palm Beach County under his name or the LLC, according to public records.

Real estate agents like package deals — and this transaction seemed ripe for one, considering that a vacant lot measuring about two-fifths of an acre is for sale next door at 167 Dunbar Road. If the lots were combined, the new owner would double his or her land.

Owned by Laura Andrassy, one of golfer Greg Norman’s exes, the vacant lot is co-listed for sale at $4.25 million by agents Toni Hollis and Gloria More of Fite Shavell & Associates.

But Yahn says the lot wasn’t a factor in the sale, which was recorded Oct. 9 by the Palm Beach County Clerk’s office. Nor, he adds, was Andrassy interested in buying the house.

“Oddly, no one wanted the package – I tried,” Yahns says.

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Linked to Conrad Black home sale — So who exactly was behind the trust that paid $23.1 million last year for the ocean-to-lake estate of convicted felon and former media mogul Conrad Black at 1930 S. Ocean Blvd.?

Public records link investor and investment adviser Lloyd I. Miller III to the property’s address. Miller and his wife, Susan, had a home in Naples on the gulf coast, and he has family ties to Cincinnati, Ohio.

Agents Paulette Koch and Dana Koch of the Corcoran Group handled the buyer’s side of the deal when the house sold in April 2011. As is their custom, neither mother nor son would identify the names of the home’s new occupants at the time of the sale, nor would listing broker Lawrence Moens of Lawrence A. Moens Associates.

The house at one point secured bail for Black, who was released from a Florida prison in May after serving time for mail fraud and obstruction of justice. Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel, have reportedly returned to his native Canada.