What will $54M get you? Trump's former Greenwich mansion

• The 47-room mansion 8 bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, 8 fireplaces,
• House is on a private 6-acre peninsula in Long Island Sound
• The Georgian Colonial was built in 1939

Say what you will about Donald Trump's taste or politics, but you can't deny that he's got a terrific eye for prime-time real estate.

In 1982, he scored a magnificent 1939 Georgian Colonial on its own private peninsula in Greenwich, with drop-dead water views from nearly every room. He bought it from the original owners for just under $4 million, and he and his then wife Ivana and their three children made it their idyllic weekend home in the country for the rest of the decade.

Now the current owners, who bought the 47-room mansion in 1998, have decided to sell, and the 20,000-square-foot manse in the gated Indian Harbor community is on the market for $54 million. It boasts eight bedrooms, 13 bathrooms and eight fireplaces, many of them antique marble.

The mansion is awash in luxury features, including indoor and outdoor pools, a three-story rotunda with a butterfly stairway, paneled library, home theater, oak floors, a billiard room with wet bar, and ornate plaster moldings. Most public rooms have French doors that open to a putting green, dock, tennis court, manicured lawns and multiple terraces and patios.

The second level has six family suites, including a master with fireplace, exercise/sitting room, over-the-top bath and extensive closet space.

"The Trumps entertained here a lot," says listing agent and luxury broker Tamar Lurie of Coldwell Banker. "It's very much an entertaining house."

"The current owners are very low key," she says. "They certainly entertain, but they're much more family oriented. They brought it down a notch."

Lurie handled last year's sale of Ron Howard's 32-acre property in Armonk and Greenwich, which at $27.5 million was the highest residential home sale in Westchester history. Before it went up for sale, none of the other competing brokers for the listing thought the Howards would get more than $20 million. It was Lurie who encouraged the couple to aim high.

"This is so spectacular, from the point of view that there's nothing like it," she says of the current Greenwich property. "To compare it, you need to compare it to properties around the world — like the French Riviera. It will be the same buyer."

"What they will look for here is the beauty and the rarity of 6 flat acres of waterfront," Lurie explains. "It's ideal for entertaining, for a big family or if you have extended family."

And perhaps it will be the same type of buyer now flooding the top of the market in Manhattan.

"This is one of the best investments one could have," she says. "We know New York is on fire, real estate wise. Foreign investors have decided it's a good place to park their money."

The current owners undertook a major renovation in 2000, adding the tennis court on one side of the house and a 4,000-square-foot guest wing on the other. Some of the furnishings and decor feel a bit dated, and not to everyone's taste, but they are certainly grand.

When the Trumps lived here, "they would arrive at the waterside retreat in either a stretch limo or red convertible with an IVANA license plate," according to a 1990 People Magazine article. "This is where they come to lead a normal family life," says a neighbor. In spite of the presence of three guards and two nannies, "the kids can fish and ride bikes. They go to McDonald's," according to the People article.

At the time, Ivana was also refurbishing the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, and she used many of the same deluxe materials that are typical of the go-go 1980s, including buckets and buckets of gold leaf, while decorating the Greenwich home.

Ivana got the house when the couple divorced in 1991, and the current owners bought it for $15 million in 1998.

LIKE THIS HOUSE?

Address: 21 Vista Drive, Greenwich, Conn.

Price: $54 million

Inside: 8 bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, 8 fireplaces, 19,773 square feet

MLS No.: 91769

Contact: Tamar Lurie, Coldwell Banker, 203-622-0245, LurieTamar@gmail.com