Gerald Ensley: A place called Nautilus
(This column was first published in the Tallahassee Democrat on Oct. 31, 2011. The asking price for this property in Jefferson County in 2011 was $620,000. That was then. It was purchased as a private home in 2012 and now the owners have placed it on the market for $2.4 million. The main home and its property is listed as $1.79 million and the adjacent building is listed as $890,000.)
LLOYD — It's true, as Jerry Shafer said, "When you get out in the woods, you never know what you'll see."
Like a 9,000-square-foot house of curving walls, round rooms, a lecture hall, a tower and scads of books and art. Like an unfinished 12,000-square-foot convention center — with another tower — in the circular, many-chambered image of the property's namesake shell. Like a whale-shaped garage. Like 58 acres of woods, creeks and ponds, dotted with large, metal sculptures.
Welcome to Nautilus, the unique compound in rural Lloyd once donated to Florida State University but now for sale by the Miami-based, LeRoy Collins Center for Public Policy — for the not unholy price of $620,000. Shafer, a real-estate agent, believes it would make a great conference center or retreat or bed and breakfast — or maybe somebody's residence.
"I can see it being a home," Shafer said. "But it would be (the home of) an unusual person."
It already has been.
Nautilus is the former home of the late Florida State professor Francois Bucher, a celebrated eccentric who taught medieval art and architecture at FSU (1978 to 1996) and died in 1999. The Swiss-born Bucher was an Old World scholar who spoke five languages, taught at several Ivy League universities and could hold forth on any topic — as well as a bohemian free spirit with a taste for the unusual and provocative.
Bucher built his compound between 1980 and 1990 as his residence and headquarters of his Nautilus Foundation — and designed structures with flair. All walls curve; no two windows are the same size; the house and convention center have towers; the unfinished convention center has a 90-feet-in-diameter circular hall topped by a telescoping, metal roof.
The main house includes a lecture hall with a stage and balcony. The house is stuffed with Bucher's collections of books, paintings, sculptures, toys, curios — and furniture, such as a couch once owned by Albert Einstein, whom Bucher knew while teaching at Princeton.
Out in the woods, scattered along a planned "Art Path," are several metal sculptures and a pentagonal, iron gazebo.
Bucher envisioned the Nautilus Foundation becoming an artists' retreat and think tank, "a place to promote creative thinking of ways to build a better world," Bucher said. During the 1990s, Bucher hosted exhibits by local and national artists, lectures by world-famous architects and concerts by avant-garde musicians.
"His reputation did not do him justice," said Paula Fortunas, president of Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare Foundation and a former vice president of the FSU Foundation. "He was thought of as eccentric. But he was a true scholar and in the long run, very generous."
Indeed, upon retiring in 1996, Bucher donated his property, buildings and collections to FSU — a donation then valued at more than $3 million. Yet FSU didn't exactly accept the donation.
Then-FSU President Sandy D'Alemberte was dismayed by the crazy quilt construction and worried Bucher could not afford the donation. So he turned down the Nautilus property, located 20 miles east of FSU in the deep woods of Jefferson County.
"Francois wanted us to pledge to keep it in a certain shape, but none of those buildings met code," said D'Alemberte, FSU's president from 1994 to 2002. "I just didn't feel we could hold up our end. He was a wonderful guy, but a crazy guy. So I turned it down."
Instead, D'Alemberte offered it to the Collins Center for Public Policy, then an on-campus think tank dedicated to the memory of former Florida Gov. LeRoy Collins. The center took it over before Bucher's death, and announced it would refurbish the house and use it as a conference center.
The center cleaned up the main house and hosted three or four events a year. But in 2001, the Collins Center split into The LeRoy Collins Institute and the LeRoy Collins Center for Public Policy.
The institute remained at FSU, where it is funded by an endowment and does research for public policy. The center moved to Miami (with satellite offices in three cities, including Tallahassee), where it is a self-supporting organization doing public policy contract work such as mediating home foreclosures in Florida.
The Miami-based Collins Center encountered controversy this summer when Rod Petrey, director since 1992, resigned in a dispute with the board of directors, reportedly over the center's finances. In August, the board tapped Merritt Stierheim, the former county manager of Miami-Dade County, as interim director. As part of its reorganization, the center decided to sell the Nautilus property.
"For one thing, we can use the money," Stierheim said. "We have no use for the property. If we can get a fair price for it, we're in the market to sell."
All of Bucher's art, books and collectibles — which Stierheim estimates are worth between $500,000 and $1 million — will be sold and are not part of the property sale.
The most valuable pieces have already been moved into storage in Miami, including a painting by Josef Albers valued at nearly $300,000. Many striking pieces remain at Nautilus — such as Einstein's yellow couch, a Gaugin print, a 1980 sculpture dedicated to international refugees and a soapbox derby-type vehicle in the shape of a nude woman — but eventually will be sold or moved into storage in Miami.
The Collins Center, which employs a caretaker in Lloyd, has kept the main house in good condition and done some interior renovations. The challenge is finding a buyer with the imagination to embrace the building's unusual architectural style.
"There are no straight walls anywhere in the place," marveled Shafer.
The unfinished convention center may be an albatross. The fortress-like, circular concrete structure — intended to represent a nautilus shell — has 11 windowless apartments, a library, kitchen and director's quarters plus the main hall. But almost every wooden beam is rotting because of improper building techniques. The metal roof would make it impossible to hear during a rainstorm. The building has no heating and air-conditioning.
"Would you spend $2 million to fix it up — or $48,000 to tear it down and build something new for $1 million?" Shafer asked. "Some say it's too neat to tear down, and I'm one of those."
In any event, the heavily wooded property on the banks of Lloyd Creek could intrigue the right buyer. But it probably will never be the artist colony envisioned by Bucher — who is buried beneath a concrete tomb behind the main house.
"I'm sure (the sale) would be disappointing to Francois," said Jerry Draper, retired dean of the former FSU School of Visual Arts and Dance, in which Bucher taught. "I'm sure he thought it would be kept in perpetuity by the university."
Gerald Ensley was a reporter and columnist for the Tallahassee Democrat from 1980 until his retirement in 2015. He died in 2018 following a stroke. The Tallahassee Democrat is publishing columns capturing Tallahassee’s history from Ensley’s vast archives each Sunday through 2024 in the Opinion section as part of theTLH 200: Gerald Ensley Memorial Bicentennial Project.
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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Gerald Ensley: A place called Nautilus
