Wonderland developer Eustace Mita is building a 17,694-square-foot home in Avalon
The house and connected carriage house will be Avalon’s biggest residential property, surpassing the Utz house.
Wonderland developer Eustace Mita, whose proposal for a luxury seven-story hotel in Ocean City has drawn critics, is building an enormous spec house in the Avalon dunes that will be the borough’s largest home.
Mita says the 17,694-square-foot home at 5475 Dune Drive is not for his personal use, but rather a house built by his Achristavest construction company that will be offered for sale. There is no designated buyer yet, he said.
“This is a spec home,” he said by telephone. “Is it the biggest home in Avalon? Yes, absolutely. It’s not just one big home. It’s a home with a carriage house.”
Construction will require additional sand trucked in to fortify the dune for the property, which will include a 14,000-square-foot main house connected to a 3,000-square-foot carriage house.
It replaces a 7,800-square-foot home that will be torn down, said Mita, the owner of the Icona brand of Shore hotels. His company bought the property for $10.3 million in 2024.
Mita said he will continue to personally use a home on the beach in Ocean City, at 28th and Wesley.
Two stories in the new house will be subterranean and three will be above ground, he said. The below-ground floors will include a bowling alley, golf simulator, indoor pool, home theater, recording studio, and cold plunge.
He said has secured state environmental proposals and emphasized that the house, because it will occupy the same footprint as the existing house, did not need any zoning approvals from Avalon borough.
Avalon’s impressively high and vast dune system includes 11 homes. The largest existing house in the dunes is at 5299 Dune Drive and owned by the heirs to the Utz potato chip family business. It is 12,631 square feet.
The Utz family had to go to an appeals court for final approval for their 40 room shore house, over the objections of environmental groups seeking to preserve one of the last remaining high dune systems on the East Coast.
In Mita’s case, the Avalon planning and zoning board approved the plans on June 9, with the only notes being that the sand brought in should be “clean, uncontaminated, and free of hazardous substances.”
At the July borough council meeting, several residents expressed concern about the size of the project and its impact on the dunes.
Mita said the additional sand was requested by state environmental officials to fortify the dunes and will be placed on the street side near the retaining wall, not “onto the dunes” as some residents feared.
“I didn’t even need variances,” he said. “The renderings make it look overpowering.”
The additional sand, he said, was mandated by CAFRA (Coastal Area Facility Review Act) regulations.
“I can’t build one inch into the existing toe of the dunes,” he said. “I have to build a retaining wall as to not to encroach on the dune. It preserves the integrity.”
At the recent council meeting in Avalon, residents expressed concerns about the scale of the house and its prominence on top of the dune.
“It’s just a ruin, a ruin of the dunes,” said resident Elaine Scattergood, who said borough officials were being misled by claims that the property would stay within the footprint and elevation of the existing house. “If the dunes were a child, I think the protective agency would have taken it away from us.”
In Ocean City, meanwhile, those engaged in the back and forth over the Wonderland site also had a lot to say about Mita’s plan for Avalon’s high dunes.
“His home looks bigger than the hotel he wants to build in O.C.,” said one Facebook commenter.
“Barge the old home up to the Wonderland site,” said another. “Problem solved.”
Mita said his company is currently building three beachfront spec homes at 77th in Avalon, and three beachfront homes at 116th Street in Ocean City.
He said building a spec home of this size and expected sale price in the many tens of millions was “so risky.”
Who would be a potential buyer?
“LeBron James,” he mused. “Or Taylor Swift. She spent summers in Stone Harbor. There’s a recording studio. You can’t even buy a beach block lot in Avalon or Stone Harbor for $5 million.”
