House of the Year: A Windswept Ranch

The top U.S. home was a ranch in Montana. An Adirondacks getaway was in the second spot, while a Hawaii mansion came in third. Outside the U.S., a Mediterranean-inspired spread on Australia’s Coral Sea was the most popular pick.

All three U.S. properties are still for sale, a reminder of the relative slowdown in the high-end home market. In 2017, the most expensive 5% of homes spent 116 days on the market, 5.35% longer than the year before, according to Realtor.com. That compares with a 7.33% drop to 71 days for all homes. (News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, also operates Realtor.com under license from the National Association of Realtors.)

“What we define as luxury is actually becoming pricier,” said Javier Vivas, director of economic research at Realtor.com, noting that in 2017 the cutoff was $804,000, up 5.14% from the year before. That has shrunk the pool of buyers, keeping homes on the market longer, he said.

Fewer wealthy homeowners are looking to trade up versus 2014 and 2015, when many bounced back from the recession and invested in more expensive real estate, said

Ralph McLaughlin,

chief economist of listing website Trulia.

At the same time, some areas—particularly in California, Hawaii and Colorado—are seeing double-digit price gains and swift sales, thanks to a thriving economy on the West Coast and residents’ desire for ski homes and vacation properties, Mr. Vivas said.

“There’s been a bit more inventory than in previous years,” said Joel Goodrich, an agent in San Francisco with Coldwell Banker Global Luxury, “but things are selling.”

—Leigh Kamping-Carder

Winner: A Sprawling Montana Ranch

Dancing Wind, a working ranch comprising about 1,750 acres, is the winner of WSJ.com’s annual House of the Year poll, capturing 74.82% of the votes in the matchups with other properties.

Tamra Call and her late husband, Jay, spent two years looking for a ranch before finding this property in Livingston, Mont. “We had some criteria. We wanted trees, we wanted water, we wanted close proximity to the wilderness,” Mrs. Call, 64 years old, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last year.

While the property was popular with readers, it has yet to find a buyer. It has been on and off the market since it was first listed in 2010 with an asking price of $27 million. In 2016 it was relisted with an asking price of $15 million. In 2017 the price was further reduced, to $12 million, where it still stands. Jim Taylor, of Hall and Hall, has the listing.

The couple created the ranch from three purchases in the late 1990s, then spent more than the current asking price on the improvements, said Mrs. Call.  It took two years to build the more than 8,000-square-foot main house, during which time they lived in a mobile home on the property. The mobile home is now rented out. It has its own small barn that was made into an office and a larger barn that the couple refurbished.

The Calls chose a mountain style for the stone house, which has three bedrooms, four full baths and two half-baths. The great room includes a bar, a pool table and a poker table. More than 2,100 square feet of stone patios capture the views of Paradise Valley. A pond in front of the house is used for fly fishing, Mrs. Call said. Another barn, originally built for horses, has been used for parties, including a ranch hand’s wedding, Mrs. Call said.

The ranch’s headquarters include a 2,800-square-foot, four-bedroom manager’s house and a 2,700-square foot, four-bedroom house that could be used for guests or an assistant manager. It also has an equipment shed with room to store a helicopter, utility sheds, corrals and a calving barn with a veterinary room.

The ranch has 235 cows and 12 bulls, said Mrs. Call in a recent interview, but it no longer has any calves—and just one of 10 llamas remains. The ranch has roughly 938 acres of grazing land, 495 acres of irrigated meadows and 311 acres of forest.

Moose, deer, bear and elk pass through the property, she added. “It’s very peaceful,” Mrs. Call said.

The property is about 15 miles to the airport in Livingston. A hangar at the airport can be negotiated as part of the home sale. It is about a 35-minute drive to Bozeman.

Mr. Call, an entrepreneur, was the founder and chief executive officer of the oil company Flying J. He died in 2003.

Mr. and Mrs. Call named the property Dancing Wind Ranch after watching the wind blow the grass in a circular motion. “There are spots on the ranch that are just breathtaking,” said Mrs. Call. “Paradise Valley is so beautiful and where the ranch sits you can see nearly the whole valley.”

Mrs. Call is selling because she says she spends more time in Arizona. “It would be good to have somebody with a young family up there. It’s meant for families. It’s time to move on for me.”

—Sarah Tilton

2nd Place: A Lakefront Retreat in New York’s Adirondacks

John and Sandra Taylor were frequent visitors to Lake Placid, N.Y., before deciding to build a vacation home there.

They wanted a timeless aesthetic, so “that you can’t tell if it was built yesterday or 100 years ago,” Mr. Taylor said last year in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

The 11,000-square-foot, three-story home was featured as a House of the Day in August and came in second in the House of the Year voting. It received 67.32% of the picks in competition with other homes. It is still on the market, with an asking price of $9.2 million.

The couple spent two years on its construction, hiring Andrew Chary as the architect and Ann Stillman O’Leary as interior designer. Artisans were brought in to custom-design the home’s parquet floors and iron staircase railings.

“Sandra and I had some of the most fun couple years of our life building this house,” Mr. Taylor says.

Mr. Taylor is manager of the Taylor Made Group, a supplier to the recreational marine industry, and boating is an element of the property.

Gardens and walkways lead down a hill to a dock with an enclosed boat house. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame views of Mirror Lake, adjacent to Lake Placid. A glass elevator also offers waterfront views.

The Taylors, who spend summer at the house and winters in Florida, decided to sell in favor of a smaller home.

Dominic J. S. Longcroft, the listing agent with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, says potential buyers are looking at the property as a vacation home.

“We’ve seen a swing in interest back to purchasing properties far away from big cities,” Mr. Longcroft says.

—Emily Nonko

3rd Place: A Mansion on Maui

When Charles “Kip” Thieriot was looking to buy a house in Hawaii, he knew he had found his home the moment he saw it.

“I went and looked at it and said, ‘This is a wonderful place.’ I saw it on a Wednesday, I bid on Thursday and the owner accepted my bid on Friday,” Mr. Thieriot said in an interview in April, when the home was a House of the Day.

His property came in a close third—with 65.62% of the matchup votes—in the recent House of the Year poll. It is still for sale, listed for $28 million. Josh Jerman, Dave Richardson and Neal Norman  of Hawaii Life Real Estate Brokers share the listing.

Mr. Thieriot, a retired real-estate investor, paid $10.5 million for the contemporary beachfront home on the island of Maui in June 2000.

“I walked through the house and I said, “I know what to do with this house,” he recalled. Mr. Thieriot, now 70 years old, also was president of the cable television and motion-picture division of the Chronicle Publishing Co., based in San Francisco, which his family once owned.

He said he went to Bali to buy the furniture and an artist from San Diego created murals throughout the house. “I had big rooms and big walls and lots of white space, and I said, ‘Let’s get creative here,’ ” he said.

He said he spent another couple of years decorating the roughly 13,422-square-foot home, looking “all over Maui” for pieces.

The house rests on slightly more than half an acre on Keawakapu Beach, and is unusually close to the beach,he said, about 40 feet from the sand. It has three ocean-view master suites, as well as five guest rooms and caretaker’s quarters. There are 10 full baths and two half-baths.

“I filled it with friends. I’d come to Hawaii and have lots of guests come,” he said. He divided his time between San Francisco and Hawaii.

Mr. Thieriot said he was selling because his life has become quieter. He has moved to a smaller house.

“It’s a funny situation,” he said in a recent interview. “The house that I use is right next door. Not only do I want to sell the house, I want to sell the house to people who are going to be good neighbors.”

—Sarah Tilton

International Winner: A Seaside Getaway in Australia

An isolated mansion in Queensland, Australia, featured in May, was the most coveted House of the Year outside the U.S., winning 67.2% of the votes in the home matchups.

Known as Mandalay House, the house is 28,000 square feet, with seven en suite bedrooms and two additional bathrooms, a climate-controlled wine room, a swimming pool overlooking the Coral Sea, a helipad and a private marina.

Inspired by Mediterranean palaces, property developer and yacht importer Neil Murray spent six years securing approvals and building the vacation home.

He initially listed it for 25 million Australian dollars, or about US$19.96 million. It spent almost three years on the market. Most recently it was listed with

Mark Beale

of Ray White Whitsunday and Carol Carter of Queensland Sotheby’s International Realty. Mr. Murray declined to comment on the sale.

The property sold in November to a Sydney businessman and his family, who plan to use it as a vacation home, listing agents said. The sale price wasn’t disclosed, but the last asking price was $13.6 million.

—Leigh Kamping-Carder

Methodology: Tuesday through Thursday each week, WSJ editors choose a distinctive property for sale to feature as the House of the Day . On Fridays, readers vote for their favorite. From Dec. 18 to Jan. 2, readers voted among the winners from the last three weeks of 2016 and the first 49 weeks of 2017 in a series of head-to-head matchups.