Addison Mizner: The Man Who Defined Palm Beach

Once the architect of the rich and famous, legendary architect Addison Mizner died bankrupt and broken by the Great Depression. Today, his designs dominate the Historical Register, and builders emulate his Palm Beach style.

One hundred years ago, Addison Mizner was the toast of Palm Beach. Bold and slightly eccentric, his career blazed like a comet across the South Florida landscape as newly minted millionaires sought to establish a Newport-type enclave in the Sunny South. Mizner’s fresh aesthetic wrapped an equally important architectural framework and tropical building techniques perfectly suited to the climate. The elites clamored for a Mizner home; by the mid-1920s, he was one of Palm Beach County’s largest employers.

His style – he called it Mediterranean Revival – is best described as a memoir of things that never were; a mashup of Spanish, Italian and Moorish design that is nostalgic, classic and fresh at the same time. In all, Mizner designed some 67 villas, mansions and public buildings in Palm Beach, including the famous Via Mizner shopping esplanade, before he turned his attention to developing Boca Raton 27 miles south. 

To understand how one architect created this enduring look in roughly 10 years begins with right-place, right-time and the sort of creative genius and hard work of which dreams are made, and books are written. The son of a successful Californian lawyer and diplomat, in his teen years he accompanied his father on numerous trips to Central America where he became enraptured by Colonial Spanish architecture. 

Young Mizner studied drafting and painting, but his only architecture training was a three-year internship with San Francisco-based architect Willis Jefferson Polk. He struck out for New York in the early 1900s but declared the large firms static and stifling. Seeking inspiration, he made yearly trips to Europe, mostly Spain, filling sketchbooks with architectural details and his suitcases with antiques, some of which he sold for cash as he struggled to get his architecture practice up and running. With commissions for interior decoration, he found a niche styling weekend homes on Long Island for New York’s elite. He even worked on yacht interiors for George Landers and Morton Plant. Requests for whole structures soon followed.

By 1918, Mizner was well known on Long Island, but following a serious injury on a building site he fell ill. A client, Paris Singer, heir to the sewing machine fortune, invited him to his Palm Beach home to convalesce. In Palm Beach, Mizner noted the hotels and bungalows were wooden and built in the northern style, making them miserable on hot days. The Hispanic-style architecture harnessing cross ventilation in cool stone and stucco walls that he had witnessed in Central America seemed far more appropriate.

To buoy his spirits, philanthropist Singer asked him to design a convalescent hospital for wounded World War I veterans, encouraging him to explore a look that would be mindful of resort living. Mizner responded with porticos and high-ceilinged rooms opening onto courtyards with fountains to cool the air. Ventilated red tile roofs sprouted towers and turrets to drink in water views. The war ended before it was complete, so Singer turned this magnificent, fanciful, pink stucco wellness palace into the Everglades Club. Its brightness, light, colors and decorative concrete flourishes captured the fancy of key Palm Beach socialite Eva Stotesbury. With her commission for El Mirasol, a 37-room oceanfront mansion at 348 North County Road, Mizner was suddenly the talk of the town.

Part of Mizner’s charm was that he was a great storyteller, embellishing history and events with fanciful details, and heapproached the designs of his Florida buildings the same way. “I never begin to design a home without first imagining some sort of romance about it,” he was quoted as saying. “Once I have my story, then the plans take place easily.” 

He liked the idea of his buildings looking as if they had been added to, with a new wing in one century and a tower in another. This sense of story explains why he took liberties, often mixing styles in a single building. It resonated with his wealthy clientele who were, in a very real sense, creating a storybook town for themselves. 

Mizner was a big man measuring six-foot-three and eventually tipping the scales at 300 pounds. Affable and kind and with quick wit, he was popular. Around town, he was frequently accompanied by his pet monkey, Johnny Brown, whose remains are buried near Mizner’s apartment off Worth Avenue. Like his contemporaries Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright, Mizner believed in creating whole environments including furniture, fountains, gardens and decor for the homes he built. 

To keep up with demand for materials – he might have a dozen projects going at once – he established Mizner Industries to craft everything from clay roof tiles to cast stone decoration, iron hardware, pottery, stained glass and furniture, both of his design and copies of antiques his artisans would distress. 

The freehand style that served him well with buildings made him a poor businessman whose reach began to exceed his grasp as he bought up tracts of land to develop in Boynton Beach and Boca. By 1926, creditors began closing in and he lost control of The Cloister Inn. The following year, the Florida real estate boom began to bust, then came the hurricane of 1928 and Black Friday in October 1929. Bankruptcy followed for his developments. Although a few bank loans kept Mizner Industries afloat, the Palm Beach chapter of his storybook life was over. 

Mizner died a broken man in 1933. Yet nearly 90 years later his name is as famous as ever, perhaps more so given the number of buildings unabashedly designed in the Mizner style and the parks, schools and streets carrying his name.

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Where to see Mizner originals:

Here are FRANK’s top pick of Palm Beach buildings that show off Addison Mizner’s energetic Mediterranean Revival style:

El Mirasol (1920)

348 North County Road

This 40-acre parcel and a 37-room house was the first of Mizner’s Palm Beach storybook houses, and the first to be demolished after the owner’s death. The only thing left of Mizner’s genius is the entrance gate, given Historic Landmark status in 1980. Today, it marks the entrance to a 14-house subdivision named El Mirasol Estates.

Via Mizner (1923)

Worth Avenue

A charming spot, this shady shopping street recalls old European cities. It is one block long from Worth Avenue to Peruvian Avenue, and its 11 buildings originally housed cafes and apartments, including Mizner’s own in the four-story tower. Every Wednesday through April 27, a docent leads a 75-minute walking tour of the Worth Avenue Area.

Casa Amado (1919)

455 North County Road

Built for Charles Munn, Jr., a bon vivant known as Mr. Palm Beach, it is the oldest surviving Mizner home on the island. Partially burned in 2007 it has been renovated with an interior by David Easton and a new entrance.

El Solano (1925)

720 South Ocean Boulevard

Mizner’s residence featured floor-to-ceiling windows, hand-stenciled wood ceilings, and seven bedrooms. He sold it to Harold Vanderbilt CBE. In 1980, it was purchased by John Lennon and Yoko Ono for $725,000. Now with a two-story pool house, its most recent sales price was $36 million

The Everglades Club (1919)

356 Worth Avenue

A private golf and social club with membership capped at 1,000. It was the first social center in the town that was not a hotel or gambling hall. It’s so exclusive there is no sign or website.

La Guerida (1923)

1095 North Ocean Boulevard

Originally designed for Philadelphia department store owner Rodman Wanamaker at a reported cost of $50,000, it was bought by Joseph P. Kennedy in 1933 for $120,000. It was better known as the Kennedy Compound and Winter White House for JFK. In 1995, it fetched $5 million from new owners who restored it to Mizner’s original plans. Its most recent sale in 2020 brought $70 million.

Cloister Inn (1926)

501 East Camino Real

The cornerstone development for Mizner’s Boca Raton was a lavish hotel and yacht basin designed to rival Palm Beach. Now named The Boca Raton, it reopened in January 2022 after a multi-million dollar facelift to return it to the original Mizner style of 1926

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