Patrick Dovigi Pays $59.75 Million for Jack Nicholson’s Former Aspen Home
Patrick Dovigi, the professional hockey player turned entrepreneur, has made another major real-estate purchase in Aspen, Colo., paying $59.75 million for a house once owned by the actor Jack Nicholson, according to property records and people familiar with the deal.
The seller is an entity tied to Seagram heiress Ellen Bronfman Hauptman and her husband, financier Andrew Hauptman, property records show.
Located in downtown Aspen within walking distance of Aspen Mountain, the property wasn’t on the market. Known as the Newberry House, it was originally built around the 1890s, when Aspen’s mining industry and population were booming, according to the National Register of Historic Places. It has about 7,900 square feet of interior space with six bedrooms, property records show.
Nicholson paid $555,000 for the house in 1980 with his friend Lou Adler, the producer and director, according to records. At the time, each had a home in Aspen, but couldn’t get TV reception, so they “went halves” on the property, located in a part of town with better reception, “chiefly so they could go there to watch Lakers basketball,” according to the 2008 book “Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times.” It turned out to be a good investment: The Hauptmans bought the house from Nicholson and Adler for $11 million in 2013, property records show.
The Hauptmans gut renovated the century-old home. The couple, who run private-investment firm Andell Holdings, sold a mansion in Bel-Air for $85 million in 2018.
Dovigi, a onetime Edmonton Oilers goaltender, is the founder of Green For Life Environmental, a services and waste-management company. Earlier this year, he sold an Aspen mansion for $108 million after buying it for $72.5 million in 2021. In 2022, he sold another Aspen home for $55 million after buying it for $44.5 million a year prior.
Riley Warwick of Douglas Elliman, who brokered the recent sale, declined to comment.
Aspen’s luxury market shot up during Covid and has remained strong. In August, the number of sales jumped 14% from August 2023, according to Tim Estin of Aspen Snowmass Sotheby’s International Realty. The median sale price was $15.2 million in August, compared with $13 million a year prior.
By: E.B. Solomont I The Wall Street Journal I September 24, 2024