Beverly Hills and Miami designer Joelle Uzyel breaks down Jeff Bezos's Florida home: three waterfront properties on Indian Creek Island bought for about $237 million in 2023 and 2024, the renovation of 28 Indian Creek around a spa, sauna, gym, and cabana office, and the estate reported in 2026 as the Palm Project. What the land assembly, the interim house, and a one-architect team reveal about building at the top of the Miami market.
Bezos bought three waterfront properties on Indian Creek Island between June 2023 and 2024 for about $237 million, roughly 6.4 acres in total.
Two of the houses, including one built in 2000, are reportedly coming down. At this level the buyer is paying for land and frontage. The houses are temporary.
He lives at the third, 28 Indian Creek, while it is renovated around a spa, sauna, gym, cabana office, and pickleball court. The program is being tested before the main house is drawn.
The planned estate, reported in 2026 as the Palm Project at about $250 million, is said to have one architect, one interior designer, and one landscaper.
On Biscayne Bay, flood elevation, hurricane glazing, salt air, and the seawall shape the design as much as taste does.
Jeff Bezos's Florida home is not one house. It is three waterfront properties on Indian Creek Island in Miami, bought between June 2023 and 2024 for about $237 million. He lives in one of them with Lauren Sánchez while it is renovated, and the other two are reportedly set to come down for a single new estate. Almost nothing about the final house has been made public. That is exactly what makes it worth studying.
Most celebrity homes get analyzed after the fact, room by room, once the photographs are out. Bezos is doing the part that usually happens out of sight: assembling land, living in an interim house, and setting the program before the architecture. I work with clients in Miami and Beverly Hills on exactly this sequence, at a smaller scale. The order of decisions is where a project like this is won or lost, and Bezos has made his in public view.
Bezos announced in November 2023 that he was leaving Seattle for Miami, to be closer to his parents and to Blue Origin's operations at Cape Canaveral. By then he had already bought two houses on Indian Creek. A third followed in 2024. Bloomberg reported each deal through people with knowledge of the sales, and county records filled in the rest.
12 Indian Creek, the $79 million house, had been listed at $85 million that May and last sold for $28 million in 2014. The third house last changed hands in 1998 for $2.5 million. County records show the 2024 sale at $87 million, which set the island's record at the time. Those jumps are not about the houses. They are about how little waterfront land on this island will ever come to market.
The detail that tells you the most is the demolition. The October 2023 house was built in 2000. It has a pool, a theater, a library, and a wine cellar. By most standards it is a complete, finished home. Reports say it is coming down anyway, along with the 1965 house beside it.
That is a lot assembly, the same move developers make when they buy neighboring parcels to build something neither lot could hold alone. Two adjoining waterfront lots give you a wider frontage on the bay, deeper setbacks, room to separate the main house from guest and staff buildings, and the freedom to orient everything to the water and the sunset rather than to the old property lines.
I see the same logic in Beverly Hills and Bel Air, where clients buy a house they have no intention of keeping because the lot, the view, or the street is what they want. The mistake is treating the existing house as the starting point for the design. If the land is the asset, the design starts from the land.
Indian Creek Island is about 300 acres with roughly 40 homes, a private golf club, its own police force, a 24-hour marine patrol, and one guarded bridge. Miami calls it the Billionaire Bunker. Bezos's neighbors include Mark Zuckerberg, whose Ferris Rafauli compound I broke down in Inside Zuckerberg's $170M Miami Mansion.
An island like this hands you half the brief before you draw a line. Perimeter security is handled at the bridge and on the water, so the house does not need to look like a fortress. That frees the architecture to open up: glass to the bay, deep loggias, gardens that run to the seawall. The privacy is engineered at the scale of the island, which lets each home feel relaxed at the scale of a family.
Land values keep climbing. In June 2025 a vacant 1.8-acre lot at 9 Indian Creek sold for $105 million, half its original asking price and still above the record Bezos had set a year earlier. The buyer was a trust, and public reports have not confirmed who is behind it. Whoever it is, a bare lot at $105 million tells you where the value on this island sits.
Bezos and Sánchez, who married in Venice in June 2025, live at 28 Indian Creek. Village permit details reported in late 2025 describe a renovation that touches nearly every room. The program is specific: a spa, a sauna, a hot tub, a firepit, a poolside cabana office, and a pickleball court. The garage was reinforced with heavy-duty doors and turned into a home gym.
Read that list as a brief and it says a lot. Wellness comes first, the same shift I cover in home wellness design. Work happens outdoors, by the pool, not in a paneled study. And the garage, the room most houses waste, becomes a gym. These are the rooms a family uses every day.
An interim house also does something a set of drawings never can. It lets the family live with a program before committing to it. If the cabana office gets used every morning and the formal rooms sit empty, that answer goes straight into the brief for the main house. I encourage clients to treat a rental or an interim house the same way: as a two-year test of how they actually live.
The planting at 28 Indian Creek reportedly includes imported royal palms, Brazilian beauty-leaf trees, and Japanese yews, installed under a professional arborist. Bronze sculptures in the manner of Fernando Botero sit on the grounds. Landscape is getting the same attention as the interiors, and on a waterfront lot in Miami that is the right priority.
Mature trees are the one thing money cannot speed up. A royal palm grows slowly, and a specimen tall enough to frame a facade can take decades to reach that height, so the only way to have one on day one is to buy it, transport it, and keep it alive through transplant. On the bay you also have salt spray, hurricane winds, and a high water table to plan around. On a site like this the arborist is not optional. It is how you protect what can be a seven-figure planting budget.
The broader lesson: landscape is a long-lead item, like custom stone or millwork. On every waterfront project I work on, I want the landscape architect at the table during the site plan, not after the house is framed. Trees decide where the shade falls, which windows get privacy, and how the house looks from the water.
In 2026 the Daily Mail reported plans for a new estate, called the Palm Project, at an estimated $250 million. The coverage described resort-style pools, tropical landscaping, and private entertaining spaces. It named no firms. A source close to the project described the team simply: one architect, one interior designer, one landscaper. One engineering firm was said to have worked on the retractable roof over Wimbledon's Centre Court and on the Sphere in Las Vegas.
Take the details as reported, not confirmed. As of late 2025, coverage noted that no formal construction plans or permit applications had been filed, and no renderings have been released. What can be read is the structure of the team, and it is the most telling detail of all.
One designer per discipline is how a compound stays coherent. Big estates often go wrong when every building, every wing, and every garden gets its own consultant, and the property ends up reading like a resort assembled from parts. A single interior designer means one material language from the main house to the pool cabana. A single landscaper means the gardens tie the buildings together instead of dividing them. The engineering talent suggests something ambitious overhead or across the water, but the discipline is in the small team.
Whatever the Palm Project looks like, the site will decide a lot of it. Indian Creek sits low in a coastal flood zone, so the finished floor has to sit well above grade. That elevation shapes everything: the height of the front steps, how the pool deck meets the house, and how a ground floor can still feel connected to the garden.
Miami-Dade's building code is among the strictest in the country for wind. Every window and door needs impact-rated glazing with county product approval, which limits the size of individual panes and drives the cost of those long walls of glass everyone wants on the water. Salt air corrodes standard metals, so hardware, railings, and exterior fixtures need marine-grade stainless or solid bronze. The seawall and the foundation, usually deep piles in this soil, are invisible and expensive, and they come first.
Then there is cost. On this island, land has traded from about $68 million to $105 million per lot since 2023. New construction and interiors at this level commonly run $1,200 to $2,500 per square foot before land, and a fully custom compound with a dedicated team can go well beyond that. If the reported figures hold, Bezos will have spent close to half a billion dollars on land and construction combined. For a more grounded look at Miami build costs, see my Miami condo renovation cost guide.
If I were handed this site, I would start with the plan of the whole property, not with any one room. Where does a guest arrive, and where does a delivery truck arrive? Where do staff park, eat, and move without crossing the family's path? Where does the boat dock sit relative to the main living rooms? On a compound, those answers decide whether the house feels calm, and they are almost impossible to fix after the walls go up.
Next I would set one material language for every building on the property. In Miami that might be a pale limestone or coral stone, a single warm wood such as teak or white oak, bronze for the metal, and a short list of colors pulled from the water and the planting. The pool cabana should feel like it belongs to the main house, not like a separate purchase.
And I would carry the interim house's lessons straight across. If the cabana office is where the real work happens, the new office belongs by the water too. If the gym in the garage gets used daily, the new wellness wing earns a prime spot, not a basement. This is the sequencing I hold in my own design-build practice: land, site plan, back of house, program, and only then the rooms.
Compare Bezos with his neighbor. Zuckerberg bought a house already under construction and is finishing someone else's vision. Bezos bought land and is starting from nothing. Compare him with the Beckhams, whose North Bay Road home is a finished, quiet, wellness-led house. Bezos is building toward the same values, wellness, outdoor living, and privacy, but from the ground up and at a much larger scale.
It also says something about Miami. Bezos already owns the 1937 Jack Warner estate in Beverly Hills, bought for $165 million in 2020. Choosing to build from scratch in Miami, rather than renovate there, shows where the market for primary residences at this level has moved. Clients I work with in Miami and Beverly Hills increasingly split their year between both, and they expect the Miami house to be the one built for daily life.
The design is still private. The method is not: buy the land, live with the program, keep the team small, and let the site lead. That is the part worth copying at any budget.
Jeff Bezos's Florida home is on Indian Creek Island, a private, roughly 300-acre island in Biscayne Bay just west of Surfside in Miami-Dade County, often called the Billionaire Bunker. He owns three waterfront properties there: 11, 12, and 28 Indian Creek Island Road. He lives at 28 Indian Creek with Lauren Sánchez while plans move forward for a new estate on the neighboring lots.
About $237 million across three purchases. He paid $68 million in June 2023 for 11 Indian Creek, a 1965 house of about 9,300 square feet on 2.8 acres, $79 million in October 2023 for 12 Indian Creek, the 19,000-square-foot house next door, and about $90 million in 2024 for a six-bedroom house at 28 Indian Creek Island Road. County records put the third sale at $87 million, which set the island's record at the time.
Reports say yes. Bloomberg reported that Bezos plans to live at 28 Indian Creek while he demolishes the two neighboring houses and builds one estate on the combined land. In 2026 the Daily Mail reported a project called the Palm Project with an estimated cost of about $250 million. No renderings, permits, or construction schedule have been made public, so the design itself is still unknown.
The design team has not been named publicly. A source quoted in 2026 coverage described the team as one architect, one interior designer, and one landscaper, supported by an engineering firm that reportedly worked on the retractable roof at Wimbledon's Centre Court and on the Sphere in Las Vegas. Until permits are filed with the Village of Indian Creek, the names stay private.
Village permit details reported in late 2025 describe a near-total interior renovation. The program includes a spa, sauna, hot tub, firepit, a poolside cabana office, and a pickleball court. The garage was reinforced with heavy-duty doors and converted into a home gym, and the grounds were planted with imported royal palms, Brazilian beauty-leaf trees, and Japanese yews under a professional arborist.
Indian Creek Island has about 40 homes, its own police force, a 24-hour marine patrol, and a single guarded bridge as the only road access. It also has a private golf club. Residents and owners have included Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tom Brady, and Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. The security, privacy, and scarcity of waterfront land are why it earned the nickname.
Land is the largest number. Waterfront lots have traded from about $68 million to $105 million since 2023. New construction and interiors for a house at this level commonly run $1,200 to $2,500 per square foot before land, and a fully custom compound with a dedicated design team can go well beyond that. Flood elevation, hurricane-rated glazing, seawalls, and deep foundations add cost that an inland lot does not carry.
The first lesson is sequencing: Bezos assembled the land, then made one house livable, and only then began the main build. The second is that the program came before the architecture, with wellness, outdoor living, and work space defined at the interim house first. The third is that one designer per discipline holds a compound together. In my own practice, I set the site plan, the back of house, and a single material language before any room is designed.