By Libertina Brandt
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Lucia Howard's mountainside home in Arizona sits at an elevation of roughly 1,960 feet. It's so high, in fact, that she can sit on her deck and watch the roof of Chase Field, the Phoenix home of the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball team, open and close.
According to local civil engineer Nick Prodanov, Howard's home is the highest residential point in the 85253 ZIP Code, which includes Paradise Valley and some surrounding areas.
Now Howard is putting the house on the market for $12.95 million.
The roughly 7,300-square-foot home has three bedrooms and an outdoor pool, according to listing agent Joan Levinson of Realty One Group.
Howard's home is located in Clearwater Hills, a gated community which is surrounded by, but not part of, Paradise Valley, said Levinson. Howard and her late husband, lawyer Wayne Howard, bought the roughly 2-acre property in 2015 for $1.8 million, she said.
The parcel had a circa-1970s home with a disjointed layout, low ceilings and few windows. "It was not an appealing house," said Howard, a retired lawyer who invests in real estate.
The house started out as an investment project for Howard. Planning to flip the home, she gut-renovated it, raising the ceilings and converting a patio into a third bedroom, leaving one wall as exposed mountainside. A covered patio extends to an outdoor pool and dining area, a rare feature on a mountainside due to the challenge of creating flat surfaces, Levinson said. Upstairs, there is a wraparound deck. Every stone used in the house came from the mountain, Howard said.
Ultimately, Howard said, her husband loved the house so much that they decided to move into it in 2016, selling their nearby home.
The property has unobstructed views of Camelback Mountain, Mummy Mountain, the Four Peaks landmark in the Mazatzal Mountains and downtown Phoenix, said Levinson.
"On a clear day, you can see pretty much all of the towns and cities surrounding Phoenix," Howard said; that means multiple fireworks displays are visible on the Fourth of July.
Wayne died in 2020. Howard, 73, said she has decided to sell because she is getting older and the home is too big for one person.
"If Wayne was here, we'd probably never sell this house," she said. "With him gone, it's not the same enjoyment. I enjoyed the fact that he enjoyed it so much."
She plans to stay in Arizona.
The median sale price in Clearwater Hills was $6.5 million in February, more than double the price in February 2024, according to Redfin. Levinson recently sold a newly built house on the same street as Howard's for $16.436 million.
Earlier this year, a home in Paradise Valley sold for $33.5 million, setting a record for the state, according to Zillow.
Write to Libertina Brandt at Libertina.Brandt@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 04, 2025 17:00 ET (22:00 GMT)
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