Bret Baier’s opulent Washington, D.C., mansion is rumored to have found a buyer: Howard Lutnick, the longtime CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and Donald Trump’s pick for Commerce secretary, sources tell me. The 16,250-square-foot French-château-style affair at 2400 Foxhall Road in the Berkley neighborhood was listed last October for $31.9 million but dropped to $28.995 at the beginning of the year. It seems the buying season that the district’s luxury brokers have been anticipating is here.
The house, which the Fox News host had only recently finished building, has five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a cinema, a spa, an indoor sports court, a custom bar in the living room with a floor-to-ceiling wine display, a 56-foot-long heated pool, and a chipping and putting green with sand traps. It sits on 1.47 acres with a car court that encircles a fountain.
Sotheby’s listing broker Daniel Heider’s office, reached on the phone, was unable to confirm a buyer or even a sale: “We’re under an NDA and confidentiality agreement,” I was told. Neither Baier’s nor Lutnick’s camp responded to requests for comment.
The gated Foxhall property is built with security in mind. Amy Baier told The Wall Street Journal last year that because of her husband’s public-facing job, “we created this private place where we could escape to and not worry about any intruders.” The couple invested heavily in the landscaping, trucking in 300 tons of limestone and hundreds of trees. But shortly after completing the house, which replaced a more modest home on the property, the Baiers bought a $37 million mansion in Palm Beach.
Whether or not the rumors are true, the house is certainly up to the nominee’s high standard of living: Lutnick, who, according to Forbes, is worth $1.5 billion, once lived in a Trump Palace apartment staffed with an English butler before moving into a 10,600-square-foot townhouse on the Upper East Side. If the house sells at the current asking price, it will break the $24.56 million Washington record, set in 2007.
Real-estate brokers say that an incoming administration usually produces a flurry of high-end house sales starting in late December to early January. The last time Trump was in the White House, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin paid $12.58 million for a Massachusetts Heights mansion, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross bought a $12 million seven-bedroom Beaux-Arts mansion in the same neighborhood, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson spent $5.5 million on a four-bedroom in Kalorama. Lutnick’s alleged buy makes those homes look like bargains in comparison.