Though it served for many faithful years as house of worship for Miami Beach's Orthodox Jewish community, this 1930s Art Deco building by L. Murray Dixon has sown some pretty wild oats since its secular conversion. Bought for $1.25M in 2003 by tech entrepreneur Daniel Davidson and turned into a personal home and event space, The Temple House, featured in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, has since served as the location for One Direction's video for "Best Song Ever" (you know, the one with the long intro where Niall and Louis dress up as sleazy music execs, and Harry plays the nerdy marketing guy) and the Kardashian family's unforgettable 2012 Christmas card. As if that weren't enough, its capacious double-height living room, which congregants used for meetings and ceremonies, has hosted many a celebrity soiree in its day; the listing breathlessly brags about being graced by the presence of notables like Nicki Minaj, Al Gore, and Ricky Martin before even touching on a physical feature of the five-bedroom compound.
To be fair, though, there's not much to say: Davidson made the sound decision to leave structural features largely untouched, including the long, vertical windows running down the façade, and aside from adding an open-sky second-floor courtyard with an infinity pool, it looks like the biggest changes he made were converting classrooms into bedrooms, which he left as blankly minimal as the rest of the 13,100-square-foot interior. Asking $16.9M, Davidson clearly expects quite the turnaround. Is the Midas-like touch of the world's biggest boy band—or the title of largest single-family home in Miami—enough to give it to him?
South Beach's Largest Single Family House [Antigen Realty via WSJ]