In the Annapolis Historic District, a few blocks from the Naval Academy gate, stands a three-story Dutch Colonial that Paul Prager first noticed as a midshipman. Decades later, by then an energy executive, he bought it, restored it from the slate roof down, and in 2023 sold it. The Paul Prager House is now in other hands. The restoration is why people still look it up: a century-old home brought fully into the modern era without erasing what made it worth saving in the first place.
This guide covers the house’s history, what the restoration changed, what the sale records show, and the other houses Prager has bought and sold.
The Paul Prager House at a Glance
| Detail | Record |
|---|---|
| Location | Annapolis Historic District, Maryland |
| Built | 1905, as a boarding house (county records list 1920) |
| Original builder | Anne Jeffers, Maryland’s first female State Librarian |
| Style | Dutch Colonial, three stories plus a finished lower level |
| Size | About 4,990 sq ft; five bedrooms, five and a half bathrooms; 4,310 sq ft lot |
| Bought by Prager | April 2017, for $900,000 |
| Listed after restoration | December 2022, at $3.85 million |
| Sold | September 2023, for $3.225 million |
Who Is Paul Prager?
Paul Prager isn’t a household name, but on Maryland’s Eastern Shore he carries significant weight. A Brooklyn native and U.S. Naval Academy graduate, he founded Beowulf Electricity & Data in 1990 and is co-founder, chairman, and CEO of TeraWulf, a publicly traded company that has moved from bitcoin mining into data centres for high-performance computing. In July 2026, TeraWulf signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic for an AI campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, which is the main reason his name has been in the news.
The Naval Academy runs through the Annapolis story. Prager sits on the Academy’s Foundation board, and his son was a midshipman while the house was being restored, according to Annapolis Home Magazine.
A 1901 Lot and a Librarian’s Boarding House
The house sits on one of six lots subdivided in 1901 from land associated with two of the city’s great 18th-century houses, the William Paca House and the Hammond-Harwood House. The neighbourhood has been a National Historic Landmark District since 1965, so almost anything visible from the street is subject to preservation review.
It was built in 1905 by Anne Jeffers, Maryland’s first female State Librarian. Her father, Commander Nicholson Jeffers III, was a member of the Naval Academy’s first graduating class in 1846. Jeffers ran it as a boarding house. About a decade after it was built, the house was remodelled into the Dutch Colonial it is today and raised from two and a half stories to three. The gambrel roof, in other words, is an early alteration rather than the 1905 design, which may explain why county records give a later build date.
Prager bought it in April 2017 for $900,000. The sale terms in the listing record were all cash, a two-week close, and no inspections, which suggests a buyer who already planned to take the house back to its bones.
The Restoration
The Dutch Colonial character is easy to read from the street: a gambrel roof with flared eaves, now under a new Buckingham slate roof with copper flashing and gutters. Red brick entrance steps lead up to a dark gray wooden door framed by sidelights and a transom, flanked by black wrought-iron railings. The original windows and trim were repaired rather than replaced. These aren’t decorative afterthoughts. They’re the period-appropriate details that separate a genuine restoration from a cosmetic refresh.
The architect was Greg Wiedemann of Wiedemann Architects in Bethesda, working with builder Mike Campbell of Winchester in Millersville. Wiedemann’s brief, as he described it, was to restore the original residence and replace a later southwest rear addition with one sympathetic to the original architecture. That new addition now holds the kitchen and breakfast room. The finished house was certified LEED Gold, which is unusual for a building of this age in a protected district.
What the Interior Looks Like
The first thing you notice inside is the stairway. It’s a custom three-floor cantilevered design with a mahogany handrail, and it serves as the spine of the house. Set into the cap of the first-floor banister is a Naval Academy insignia medallion, a small detail that ties the home to its setting and to Prager’s own history.
White oak floors run through the main living areas, under high ceilings and two gas fireplaces. The kitchen, in the new rear addition, pairs marble countertops with navy-blue cabinetry and brass hardware. The colour choice is a quiet nod to the maritime culture of the city. French doors open onto a curved brick staircase and a private patio, set in the kind of cloistered rear garden common to early 20th-century Annapolis houses.
The two upper floors hold four bedrooms, including a primary suite with custom closets, and an upper-level living room with its own fireplace that opens onto a rooftop balcony with views over the historic streetscape. Every bathroom was rebuilt with heated floors and marble. A finished lower level adds a fifth bedroom, a full bathroom, laundry, and a second full kitchen. The house also has a private driveway, which is rare on these streets.
Interior designer Shaun Jackson, who has worked with Prager since 2006, curated the rooms around his collections: military memorabilia, maritime artwork and original posters covering military recruitment, propaganda, fashion, opera and travel. The result feels personal rather than staged, more like a home assembled over time than one decorated all at once.
Bought for $900,000, sold for $3.2 million
Prager put the restored house on the market at the end of 2022. The sale history in the public record looks like this:
| Date | Event | Price |
|---|---|---|
| April 2017 | Bought by Prager | $900,000 |
| December 2022 | Listed | $3,850,000 |
| September 5, 2023 | Sold | $3,225,000 |
The listing leaned on the restoration. It named the Annapolis Home Magazine feature, the Winchester build, and the medallion in the stair. The house sold for $625,000 below its asking price, but still at roughly three and a half times what Prager paid.
That ratio isn’t a profit figure. The cost of the restoration has never been published, and a gut renovation with a new addition, a slate roof, and LEED certification in a landmark district is not cheap. Prager hasn’t said publicly why he sold. The buyer is a private individual, and the house isn’t open to visitors.
Paul Prager’s Other Houses
Annapolis wasn’t the only historic house Prager bought to restore, and it wasn’t the only one he sold. His family life, though, is centred about an hour away across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, on the Eastern Shore.
Fort Lauderdale: The Busch Mansion He Couldn’t Save
In July 2021, Prager paid $16.5 million for a waterfront estate in the Riviera Isles neighbourhood of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The seller was Michael Wekerle, the Canadian investor known from Dragons’ Den, who had put it on the market the year before at close to $20 million. The house had a pedigree to match Annapolis. It was built in the 1930s for Adolphus Busch III, then president of Anheuser-Busch, to designs by Francis Abreu, the Cuban-born architect behind several of the city’s lost landmarks. It had about 9,700 square feet, eight bedrooms, and 520 feet of deep-water frontage.
Prager gutted the interior and planned to raise the house and restore it. It had been built too low for today’s water table and king tides, and in the end the plan proved, in his listing agent’s words, “too impossible and too impractical.” In December 2022, he sold it for $19.5 million to buyers who planned to demolish it and build new, keeping only the giant banyan tree that dates from the Busch years. That same month, the restored Annapolis house went on the market.
Maiden Point Farm
Prager bought Maiden Point Farm, a 250-acre estate on the Miles River near Easton, in 2003. It’s closer to a small village than a house: a Tidewater Colonial main residence, three guest cottages and more than a dozen other buildings, with English-style gardens, a pool, a tennis pavilion, a squash court and a former barn that holds his wine collection. It’s where he and his wife, Joanne, spend weekends and holidays, and it’s the property that pulled him back to the Eastern Shore.
Manhattan
The family also keeps an apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York. Its 2006 renovation is where Prager’s working relationship with Shaun Jackson began, which is why the same designer’s hand shows up in Annapolis and in Easton.
Federal Street, Easton
Prager started buying in downtown Easton around 2008, during the recession, picking up empty and distressed buildings on and around Federal Street and restoring them rather than replacing them. The first of them now houses his offices. His Bluepoint Hospitality group runs 13 businesses in the town, according to Home & Design. They include the Austrian restaurant Bas Rouge, whose chef Harley Peet won a James Beard Award in 2024; The Stewart, a Scotch and Champagne bar; The Wardroom food market; Bonheur, a pie and ice-cream shop; and Flying Cloud Fine Art Posters, which grew out of the same poster collection that hung in the Annapolis house. His most ambitious local restoration is the Prager Family Center for the Arts, in an 1856 former Methodist church, where the Ebenezer Theater has a hand-gilded pressed-tin ceiling.
Eastern Shore Farmland
Prager owns more than 1,000 acres of Maryland farmland. It includes Prager Vineyards, where the winemaker is Helen Keplinger, and a farm in Trappe that produces European-style cheeses.
What the House Left Behind
The Paul Prager House was only his for six years, but it may be the clearest example of how he works: buy a significant old building, restore it with a small, trusted team, and let the materials do the talking. Fort Lauderdale showed the limit of that approach; Annapolis showed what it looks like when it works. The gambrel roof, the slate, the mahogany handrail, and the original windows survive because someone paid to keep them rather than replace them with something easier. The medallion in the banister stayed with the house. A Naval Academy graduate’s signature now lives in someone else’s home, a few blocks from the Academy where he first saw it.
Sources
- Annapolis Home Magazine feature on the restoration, covering the house’s history, Anne Jeffers, the 1901 subdivision, the restoration team, and materials.
- Bright MLS sale and listing history, via Redfin, for the 2017 purchase, the 2022 listing, the 2023 sale, size, lot, and room count.
- The Real Deal (July 2021) on Prager’s $16.5 million purchase of the Fort Lauderdale estate from Michael Wekerle.
- The Real Deal (December 2022) on the house’s Busch history, the abandoned restoration, and the $19.5 million teardown sale.
- Washingtonian (January 2021) on Maiden Point Farm and Prager’s buying in Easton.
- Home & Design (November 2024) on Bluepoint Hospitality, the arts centre, the vineyards, the farmland and the Manhattan apartment.
- TeraWulf press release (July 2026) on the Anthropic lease.
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