9-Million-Buck Bungalow -- For Sale: Medina Home, 6 Br, 11 Ba, Gym

Is the Seattle area ready for luxury estates selling for $45 million?

No one knows for sure, but we may soon find out.

Medina inventor and industrialist Peter La Haye and his wife, Sandy, are asking $45 million for their 30,000-square-foot home on a 5-acre waterfront estate just down the road from Bill Gates.

If the couple get anything close to their asking price, it would be among the priciest home sales in U.S. history. The highest ever paid anywhere in the United States is believed to be $50 million, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.

No Puget Sound area home has ever been listed for sale at that higher price.

The price falls short of the $53 million assessed valuation of Gates' house. But in a region still coming to terms with the first few homes breaking the $10 million barrier, it's a startling phenomenon.

"It's off the chart," said Joseph Brazen, owner of the Brazen Group, which sells homes in the "Gold Coast" of Medina, Hunts Point and the west side of Bellevue.

The La Haye property carries an assessed valuation of $16.3 million.

The upper end of the real-estate market broke the $10-million barrier two years ago when former Bayliner executive Don Saunders sold his 1,100-acre Lake Stevens estate for $11 million.

This is happening at a time when the median home price in King County leaped to $216,500 last month, up $30,500 or 16.4 percent from a year earlier.

The La Hayes' stone house, built in 1988, mixes elements of such styles as English Tudor, French chateaux and Scottish hunting lodges. It has 372 feet of waterfront, a guest house, caretaker's house, 114-foot dock and greenhouse.

The main house has six bedrooms, 11 full or partial bathrooms, an indoor pool and gym and 14 fireplaces.

"I could parallel park a Suburban in the fireplace of the living room," said a real estate agent familiar with the property.

Custom-designed for the La Hayes, the house features hand-hewn posts and beams, a hand-carved door, slate roof, and terra-cotta tile flooring.

Peter La Haye, a high-school dropout from Toronto, made his fortune producing implantable lenses for cataract patients, a diet supplement designed to ward off degenerative eye disorders, and stick-on reading lenses for sunglasses. He is the owner-operator of Redmond-based La Haye Laboratories and Neoptx.

The La Hayes are looking to downsize, said John Brian Losh, owner of the listing agency, Ewing & Clark.

Losh says the owners are ready for what could be a long wait to sell the property. Very expensive homes sometimes take several years to sell.