The couple have four grown children, and the house was conceived as a place they and their families could visit. To that end, the five bedrooms have en-suite baths “and are separate from the house,” Betsy says. “Basically, your room has its own little suite, and everything opens to the outdoors.”

In addition to the five bedrooms, there are seven full bathrooms and two half-bathrooms.

The house looks out onto a pool and backyard and faces Palm Beach. “It’s on the eastern side of Everglades Island, which is a subtle distinction but an important one, in that you get the morning sun but you don’t get the afternoon sun, which can be pretty hot,” Paul Shiverick says. “And we look east over the Palm Beach lagoon, towards the estates section of Palm Beach, so you’re looking at really nice homes that all get illuminated in the afternoon.”

The Interior
Betsy Shiverick had left her currency trading job in 2003 (following stints at Merrill Lynch, UBS, and Bank of Montreal, among others) to become an interior decorator. “Interior decoration is a lot more stressful than currency trading,” she says. “I went to the New York School of Interior Design and did a few jobs here and there, but I spent most of my time designing my own houses.”

As the house was being built, she set about designing and then furnishing the interior. She chose native Florida cypress wood for many of the rooms, alternately using it on the ceilings or as wall panels. She commissioned an ironworker in North Carolina to weld the grates and railings for the house by hand, and searched far and wide for decoration that would fit the interior.

“It was painstaking,” she says. “We didn’t go to a place like Restoration Hardware and buy a bunch of stuff. Everything is an antique, and everything was bought over time. … I don’t think there’s one piece of new furniture in there; every piece but the beds is old.”

Even the driveway is composed of old materials. “We have 13,000 antique bricks cut lengthwise and laid into the driveway in a herringbone pattern,” Betsy Shiverick says. “That took four months to do.”

(The furniture isn’t included in the price of the house, but if a buyer is interested in purchasing the decorations, the couple says it can be considered.)

Back and Forth
Building the house took 26 months, during which time, “I was going back and forth to New York every week,” Paul Shiverick says. “Betsy did everything. I was not even involved really—I mean, with some of the design features, but I wasn’t that involved in building the house.”

At roughly the same time he retired last year, the couple purchased a landmarked house in downtown Palm Beach.