The Wall Street Journal's "House of the Week" this week picked a colorful compound in Inlet Beach, Florida: a treehouse, mini golf course, and arcade museum, listed at $5,999,000. The owner is an architect himself — 53-year-old Chris Stoyles, who treated himself as the client and built what he calls a candy shop.
The property at 217 Walton Rose Lane is listed at $5,999,000: five bedrooms, four bathrooms, 3,379 square feet, built in 2015 on roughly 0.19 acre (MLS #1010556, listed by Compass). Listing data shows it is still active.
Stoyles bought the property in 2025 for around $1.5 million from an architect at his own firm, then spent roughly seven months and $1 million turning the gray-and-black house into a colorful playground. The home was originally conceived by Frank Greene, Rosemary Beach's original Town Architect, as a Japanese-inspired courtyard estate; Stoyles extensively expanded and reimagined it.
The compound comprises five separate structures — a Main House, Carriage House, Treehouse, Out House, and Arcade Building — arranged around a Japanese-inspired courtyard. At the center sit a pool, hot tub, oversized splash pad, stone gas fire pit, and outdoor cabana. A lookout tower offers Gulf views, and Wall Street Public Beach Access is about a five-minute walk away.
The yellow treehouse is built into a pine tree, its branches dividing the interior into separate rooms, with large mushrooms painted along its side. A cantilevered balcony extends over the pool, mounted with a water cannon. Stoyles describes his mindset as "a little kid in a candy shop."
The backyard's six-hole mini golf course is themed around mythical creatures, with life-size statues of Sasquatch, a unicorn, and others, plus nighttime lighting throughout. Stoyles says he made it deliberately hard: "I didn't want anybody to be able to cheat and go around obstacles."
The separate arcade building houses cabinets from the 1970s, '80s, and '90s — Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Tetris, Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, Street Fighter II, Pole Position, OutRun — plus air hockey and foosball. The machines are part of Stoyles' personal collection and are included in the sale. Inside the main house, the kitchen sports retro candy-apple red appliances and an Elvis statue with a motion-sensor light to guide late-night snack raids.
Most 30A luxury homes follow the white-shiplap-plus-Gulf-view formula; this one inverts it, designing around experience. The listing also throws in solar power, an EV charger, a six-seat golf cart, and eight bikes. Its eventual sale price will test how much "fun" is actually worth in the high-end vacation-home market.