Credit: Daderot, Wikimedia Commons
Vizcaya* should top any SGHS “must-see” list. To date, however, our only experience with James Deering’s grand Florida summer home and National Historic Landmark has come from Davyd Foard Hood’s 2007 Magnolia review of the excellent Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers.
While the name Deering may not resonate like Vanderbilt or Carnegie, the family partnership in the immensely profitable International Harvester Company allowed James, a son of the original Deering Company’s founder, William, to amass a tremendous personal fortune. Despite roots in Maine, the Deerings based their growing enterprises in the more geographically centered Illinois. Florida connections began in 1900 when William set up a Coconut Grove winter home. The 1910s then saw son Charles acquire property in Cutler for what became known as the Deering Estate, while son James collected Coconut Grove acreage to build Villa Vizcaya.
James Deering was both a conservationist and a lover of great art and architecture. As Vizcaya’s superb archives prove, he remained deeply involved with his project from start to finish. Of course, he needed help, and from early days it was interior designer and art connoisseur Paul Chalfin who became the guiding spirit behind it all. Beginning in 1910 with a Chicago apartment design commission, the Deering-Chalfin partnership endured until Vizcaya’s 1921 completion. Requiring the skills of an architect, however, Deering brought the well-trained New York-based Francis Hoffman to the team in 1912. Though not always in harmony, the group held together until 1917. The house then being complete, Hoffman departed for the army.
Setting up Vizcaya’s structures and landscape, however, involved more than toils in Coconut Grove and telegrams between Illinois and Miami. It also entailed numerous visits to Europe, especially Italy, Chalfin’s favored spot. There Deering, Chalfin, and Hoffman garnered ideas and collected fine objects, large and small, for ultimate installation in Florida. Especially influential was Villa Rezzonico in the Veneto, which Deering chose as a model for his home.
Another fortunate discovery in Italy was landscape designer Diego Suarez, a native of Columbia who had spent his formative years in Florence and trained at Accademia di Belle Arti. First meeting Deering and Chalfin in Italy, Suarez later encountered the two in New York City, and there signed on in 1914 to become the fourth member of Vizcaya’s design group.
Suarez quickly grasped the terrain and climate realities, so different from the Florentine countryside he knew well. He applied this new understanding most notably to the design and installation for the east (Biscayne Bay) and south gardens. It is often said that Vizcaya is best seen from the water, and those who get an aquatic view can thank Suarez for setting the forecourt stage for this, the most highly praised façade. (It is not clear who first presented the idea for Vizcaya’s famous concrete galleon-shaped breakwater.)
The villa’s south view encompasses an amazing gathering of formal design elements drawn from an Italian and French vocabulary. Most spectacularly, Suarez achieved the elevation changes available in Italy by terminating the garden with a large mound topped with a folly in the form of a casino. Skillfully placed statues, balustrades, fountains, ironwork, and other hardscape elements (often crafted from local materials) offer meaning and structure to an overall garden divided into distinct rooms and parterres. Defining elements are the parterres de broderie fanning out on either side of parallel aerial hedges of live oaks planted as mature trees in 1917. These pleached rows, in turn, flank a rectangular central grass panel island set in a long pool. Other distinct spaces include a secret garden, a theater garden and, of course, a maze. With a heavy emphasis on shades of green, early plants included Deering’s favorite, orchids, in abundance, along with a wide number of others suitable to this subtropical climate.
Suarez left Vizcaya in 1917 following frequent clashes with Paul Chalfin over details big and small. And indeed, while the gardens owe their overall appearance and character to Suarez, the designed landscape, including the west entry court, contains many touches added by Chalfin, a master of the pastiche. Deering’s estate was finally completed in 1921, but he survived only four years to enjoy it, dying of pernicious anemia in 1925. In 1951, his heirs sold Vizcaya’s fifty-acre core to Dade County, the archdiocese of Miami having bought the southerly acreage in 1945 for Mercy Hospital and other projects. Often smashed by hurricanes, Vizcaya has soldiered on allowing thousands of visitors to take pleasure in this pinnacle of Florida estate building that its short-lived owner was able to enjoy mainly through pre-completion collecting and constructing.
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*The name ”Vizcaya” is derived from explorer Sabastian “Vizcaino” and involves a humorous bit of miscommunication. See: https://vizcaya.org/whats-in-a-name/
For further details, visit: https://vizcaya.org/collections/gardens/about-gardens/
See also: https://www.tclf.org/landscapes/vizcaya-museum-and-gardens
For more on Suarez, see: https://www.tclf.org/pioneer/diego-suarez
Recommended reading: Witold Rybczynski and Laurie Olin, Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers.
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