Brian Rist sees the irony in buying the most expensive home ever sold on Sanibel Island, and it didn’t even have the brand of storm shutters he invented.
The $11.7 million West Gulf Drive home, built in 1998, fared relatively well from the damage wrought by Hurricane Ian on Sept. 28. The ground floor, which had a media room and other amenities, was washed out. The tile roof received some significant damage, but a new roof was already in the works despite the storm. The second and third floors remained intact, positioning Rist and his wife Kim to move from their current Cape Coral waterfront home by the summer.
According to Lee County Property Appraiser’s website, the previous most expensive Sanibel Island home was also on West Gulf Drive and sold for $11 million in January 2021.
Captiva, which has a different zip code, had a home on Captiva Drive sell for $16.3 million in 2016 and again for $17.15 million in April 2021.
Brian Rist closed Nov. 30 on the Sanibel mansion. He bought the five-bedroom, six-bath, 6,000-square-foot house from Manny Fernandez, who invented the laptop computer and once presided over Gartner as its CEO.
The home has 300 feet of beach frontage along the Gulf of Mexico and 300 feet of road frontage. It was built on three lots combined for 3.29 acres into one property, said broker Mike McMurray of Royal Shell Real Estate, who closed the deal. The home had been on the market since Nov. 10, listed at $12 million. If Rist wanted to, he could separate the third lot, which has the tennis court on it, and sell it for about $4 million in today’s market for the land alone, McMurray said.
A wine cellar, elevator, library, swimming pool and tennis court are some of the home’s features.
Dan Sater, a renowned luxury home architect, designed it. 
“It’s a special piece of property,” McMurray said. “It’s on a high ridge. It’s probably the best beach area on Sanibel. It has more of a dune-like setting. It’s a little bit wider. Over the years, watching the beach, it probably gets the least amount of beach erosion. It’s just a nice part of West Gulf Drive and a nice part of the Sanibel beachfront.”
Rist, the founder of Storm Smart hurricane shutters 26 years ago, sold that company last year and headed toward semi-retirement. He still teaches business classes as an adjunct professor at Florida Gulf Coast University’s Daveler & Kauanui School of Entrepreneurship. He also serves as chairman of the board of the Rist Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports Southwest Florida’s youth through educational initiatives.
“It’s really been a dream of my wife and I to live on Sanibel, our whole lives,” Rist said. “The opportunity presented itself to buy a special dream come true. Right now, I think due to the economy, real estate is one of the best investments you can make. I’m concerned about the stock market, with the economy being where it is and where it might go. As they say, ‘we don’t make any more waterfront real estate.’ We absolutely intend to live there. It’s a nice place.”
Rist said one of his first moves would be to install hurricane shutters. He also did not plan to refinish the ground floor the way it looked before the hurricane. Instead, he will make that a storage area and an extension of the pool deck area.
“We’ll park our cars downstairs,” Rist said. “In the event of another storm, we will just drive away. And then, of course, because of the business I was in, we’re going to harden our house even more significantly.”
McMurray said the house serves as a significant signal in Hurricane Ian’s aftermath regarding the state of Sanibel Island’s residential real estate.
“After a Category 4 hurricane, it means the islands are going to come back, and they’re come back stronger than ever,” McMurray said. “And they want to start enjoying the beach now. They want to start enjoying the sunsets now. It’s not about the restaurants. It’s not about the shops. It’s about the sunsets. It’s about the water. And he can start doing that pretty quickly. That same piece, down in Naples, would probably be $40 [million] or $50 million.”
