June 2 (Bloomberg) -- The owners of an 80-year-old mansion near Philadelphia plan to demolish the castle-like villa to build a new home. With opposition mounting, they also want to remain anonymous while they do it.

La Ronda, a Mediterranean Revival-style mansion in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, was the last commission of architect Addison Mizner, best known for his work in Palm Beach and Boca Raton, Florida. Local officials and neighbors want to negotiate with the home’s owners to see if it can be saved. The problem is, they don’t know who the owners are. A company called 1030 Mount Pleasant Road LP bought the property for $6 million in March, according to deed records.

“Some people find it fairly frustrating that they can’t express themselves directly to the owners,” Bruce Reed, a Lower Merion Township commissioner, said in an interview. “It’s definitely an unusual situation.”

The township’s board will decide tomorrow whether to let La Ronda be immediately razed or delay the wrecking ball by 90 days, Reed said. Because the 14,000-square-foot (1,301-square- meter) home lacks federal designation as a historic site, the township can’t stop the demolition, he said.

That riles residents of the township, which includes the heart of the so-called Main Line, the string of towns that sprang up west of Philadelphia along the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Millionaires such as Joseph Pew, founder of oil refiner Sunoco Inc., and Isaac Clothier, co-founder of the Strawbridge & Clothier department-store chain later acquired by Macy’s Inc., built estates starting in the late 1800s.

Lone Survivor

“Given that this is the only surviving example of a Mizner-designed home north of the Mason-Dixon line, it’s historically significant in our eyes,” said Mike Weilbacher, head of the Lower Merion Conservancy, a preservation group.

Lower Merion Township had a median family income of $148,123 in 2007, according to U.S. Census figures, the 12th- highest in the nation. With a population of almost 60,000, it’s home to singer Patty LaBelle and Andy Reid, head coach of the National Football League’s Philadelphia Eagles.

In 1929, Percival Foerderer, the owner of a leather company who made his fortune selling goatskin gloves and ladies shoes, built La Ronda on 233 acres (94.3 hectares) along Mount Pleasant Road in Bryn Mawr, according to the Lower Merion Historical Society.

Foerderer asked Mizner to create a 51-room villa. Mizner, who died in 1933, already had won fame for his Spanish-inspired designs of the Everglades Club in Palm Beach and the Boca Raton Resort and Club.

$7 Million Needed

La Ronda’s pink-hued walls are topped by towers with crenellated turrets and scroll work adorns the arched windows. The house has 21 bedrooms, according to the historical society’s records. A blue-and-yellow tiled fountain now sits empty in the estate’s courtyard, where rose bushes flank the walls.

The township and historic preservation groups want to set up a foundation to buy back La Ronda. That may take as much as $7 million, Reed said.

“I have been surprised by people’s response,” he said. “We’ve had people of significant means talking about putting up real money to save this house.”

Stacey Mattox said her electrician father worked on La Ronda in the early 1980s and would drive his children by the mansion on the weekends. The Havertown, Pennsylvania, certified public accountant now does the same with her kids.

‘A Travesty’

“I wish I had $7 million in my pocket so I could buy the place,” she said in an interview today. “There’s nothing else like it on the Main Line or anywhere else in the state. Tearing it down would be a travesty.”

Foerderer, who raised three children at the home with his wife and help from 27 employees, died in 1969 at age 84. La Ronda was sold to Villanova University in 1972, then sold and resold as the estate was subdivided. Today, the grounds have shrunk to 3.2 acres.

While the township has preservation regulations, they don’t bar home owners from razing structures that have La Ronda’s classification, said Cheryl Gelber, another Lower Merion commissioner.

“We’ve had people tear down historically significant structures in the past, but they’ve always identified themselves,” Gelber said.

The new owners expressed surprise through their lawyers at the uproar over their plan to tear down La Ronda and replace it with a 10,000-square-foot home, Reed said. The property’s neighbors include an English Tudor-style mansion and a reproduction of a French chateau.

Unexpected Attention

“They clearly didn’t expect to have this much attention being focused on their plans,” he said. “They now get that whoever knocks down a cultural icon like this probably won’t be embraced by the community.”

The only name listed for the buyer on deed records is Paul Baskowsky, a Philadelphia lawyer who is identified as the partnership’s chief executive officer.

Baskowsky, of Philadelphia’s Saul Ewing law firm, refused to identify the home’s owners in an interview. He said they “absolutely” intend to proceed with demolition.

“They have the right to knock down any building on the property that isn’t some kind of nationally protected structure, which this home is not,” Baskowsky said.

‘Empty Hole’

That doesn’t sit well with Herb Evert, who said he lived several blocks away from the mansion. Even in Lower Merion, the U.S. recession and global financial crisis have slowed the housing market, with the number of sales falling 44 percent in the first quarter to 82 and the median price declining 21 percent to $377,000, according to a report by real-estate brokerage Prudential Fox & Roach.

“It doesn’t seem like a good time to be pulling a whole house down,” Evert said. “If something goes wrong with the financing or the construction, we could have a big, empty hole in the ground for the next 10 years.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Jef Feeley in Wilmington, Delaware at jfeeley@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 2, 2009 14:47 EDT