Addison Mizner

Addison Cairns Mizner (December 12, 1872 – February 5, 1933) was an American architect whose interpretations of Mediterranean Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival architecture fundamentally altered the character of southern Florida. His style changed the character of southern Florida, where it is continued by architects and land developers to this day, and Palm Beach, which he "transformed," was his home, where most of his houses stand. Though his fame is most closely linked to the barrier island of Palm Beach, his professional footprint extended across Lake Worth Lagoon into West Palm Beach, where his manufacturing workshops anchored an entire industrial operation that made his architectural ambitions possible. He was Florida's leading architect in the 1920s, and established his own Spanish and Mediterranean Revival style that became the architectural signature of Florida, creating the ambience that truly transformed the landscape of South Florida.

Early Life and Path to Florida

Mizner was the second youngest of seven children born into a prominent family in Benicia, California, in 1872. His father, Lansing, was a lawyer and diplomat who, in 1889, was appointed Envoy Extraordinary and Minister to Central America and took the family to live in Guatemala City. The city captivated young Addison's imagination. Its decorative Spanish architecture, with Moorish-influenced and colorful tilework, as well as wrought iron fixtures, barrel tile roofs, and ornately carved wood, would become a lifelong design inspiration.

Although he had no formal university training, Addison had studied design all his life. He took a job as an apprentice with a Manhattan architectural firm and served ten years as a country house architect on Long Island. In 1897, Mizner and his brother Wilson were lured to Alaska by the Klondike Gold Rush. Failing to strike it rich, the two brothers fled to New York City, where Addison opened a shop on Fifth Avenue that dealt in colonial furniture and Guatemalan relics.

Urged by his friend Paris Singer, heir to the sewing machine fortune, Mizner visited Florida in 1918 seeking a better climate for his health. He made Palm Beach his home and began to design projects that reflected the tropical nature of the area, drawing on inspiration from his travels in Latin America. That move would prove consequential not only for Palm Beach, but for all of greater Palm Beach County, including the city of West Palm Beach directly across the water.

Architectural Style and the Mediterranean Revival

The buildings Mizner designed featured Mediterranean Revival design, crafted of stone and stucco with tile accents and courtyards and breezeways to help cool the buildings. From his very first project, Palm Beach's Everglades Club — originally planned as a World War I veterans' convalescence home — Mizner's reputation as a society architect was secure.

After a decade as a country house architect on Long Island, Mizner came to Palm Beach with sewing machine heir Paris Singer during the winter of 1918, and it was his design for Singer's Everglades Club that introduced Mediterranean style architecture to the resort. The success of the club led to commissions for resort mansions for the leaders of Palm Beach society.

Mizner's first Palm Beach design was El Mirasol, which began the look that distinguishes the town today, incorporating tiled roof towers and turrets, sheltered cloisters, and paneled rooms. His flowing floor plans opened onto patios and terraces, with stone fountains gracing the grounds. From 1919 to 1924 he designed about thirty-eight houses in Palm Beach. His clients were wealthy and socially prominent: Gurnee Munn, John Shaffer Phipps, Barclay Harding Warburton II, Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle Jr., Edward Shearson, Rodman Wanamaker, Paul Moore Sr., and Eva Stotesbury among them.

Playa Riente was Mizner's largest and most elaborately decorated home in Palm Beach, built in 1923 for Oklahoma oilman Joshua Cosden. Its entrance hall, inspired by the Stock Exchange in Valencia, Spain, was almost 60 feet long and 30 feet high. In 1922 Mizner designed the oceanfront Casa Bendita for John S. Phipps and his wife, and Via Mizner on Worth Avenue, which revolutionized Palm Beach shopping. Retail tycoon Rodman Wanamaker II hired Mizner to build La Guerida ("bounty of war") in 1923 for about $50,000, and sold it to Joseph P. Kennedy in 1933 for $120,000.

The breadth of his influences was considerable. His buildings presented an invented architecture with a fabricated history — houses filled with parts of palazzos shipped from Europe after summer buying sprees, or ornamental elements manufactured in Mizner's own shops in West Palm Beach. In 1905 Mizner visited Spain for the first time; after that, he visited Europe every year. After relocating to Florida, these visits occurred during the "off" season. In 1924, Mizner went on a buying trip to Spain, scouring antique shops, buying "furiously" thousands of items: wrought iron, tapestries, furniture, grillwork, and whole staircases.

Mizner Industries and West Palm Beach

One of Mizner's most direct and lasting connections to West Palm Beach was his founding and operation of a large manufacturing enterprise on the mainland. In order to fill his commissions, Mizner found it necessary to establish workshops in West Palm Beach to make the tiles, wrought iron fixtures, and cast-stone trim and columns to decorate the exterior of his houses, and later the furniture for the interiors.

To obtain the European styles he needed, Mizner established a group of workshops to make his own furniture and other materials: clay roof tiles, furniture, cast stone, forged iron, pottery, and stained glass. Originally financed by Paris Singer during construction of the Everglades Club, the workshops became Mizner Industries, Inc., one of the largest manufacturing firms in Palm Beach County during the 1920s.

On Bunker Road, West Palm Beach, the firm produced furniture "fashioned after designs that Mr. Mizner had originated" and "distinctive copies of antiques," which were often distressed to give them an aged look. In partnership with Woodlite, Inc., Mizner sold reproduction "wood" paneling nationwide; other facilities were in Kelsey City (now Lake Park).

Mizner's practice went beyond that of the typical architect of the time, for he also fashioned building materials — tiles, wrought iron decoration, cast stone, furniture — through his Las Manos pottery and later a conglomerate called Mizner Industries. He even devised a faux-wood material called "Woodite" made of wood shavings, plaster, and various other fibrous materials. Mizner Industries claimed that "the layman absolutely cannot tell the difference" between knotty Woodite and the genuine article.

The West Palm Beach manufacturing operation was central to the character of Mizner's architecture. Because he could control the production of nearly every decorative element himself — from hand-thrown roof tiles to cast columns to forged ironwork — Mizner was able to ensure a consistency of aesthetic across dozens of projects simultaneously. He and Singer partnered to create what was eventually known as Mizner Industries, a firm that manufactured everything from floor tiles to period furniture, to help supply the many homes and commercial structures he was commissioned to design.

The Boca Raton Development and Its Collapse

Early in 1925, Mizner decided to join what had become Florida's favorite pastime: the great land boom. In March, the Palm Beach Post reported that Rodman Wanamaker II had purchased three-quarters of a mile of ocean front land in Boca Raton for a syndicate headed by Addison Mizner.

In 1925, Addison was joined by his brother Wilson — who had established himself as a playwright, raconteur, and entrepreneur — and the pair established the Mizner Development Corporation, with financial backing from such luminaries as Irving Berlin, W.K. Vanderbilt II, and T. Coleman DuPont. He and his brother Wilson formed the Mizner Development Corporation, acquiring 17,500 acres of land and setting out to build the "Greatest Resort in the World."

Mizner designed Camino Real, a 160-foot-wide boulevard, as the focal point of his new city. In his plans, the road began at the Ritz-Carlton on the beach and ended two-and-a-half miles to the west in Ritz-Carlton Park, a subdivision designed around golf courses.

The Cloister Inn opened in 1926 at a cost of $1.25 million — at the time the most expensive 100-room hotel ever built. However, it lasted only one season. Investors began withdrawing money and demanded reorganization of the company. New management was unable to save the company from bankruptcy. (The hotel is now the Boca Raton Resort & Club.)

A large-scale 1926 real estate development in Boca Raton — for which Wilson served as treasurer — resulted in Addison's personal bankruptcy and losses for investors. The brothers' timing could not have been worse — Florida's storied land boom of the 1920s was on the verge of collapse. The failure of the Boca Raton venture cast a long shadow over Mizner's later years, even as his built legacy across the Palm Beaches remained intact and admired.

Later Years, Legacy, and West Palm Beach Remembrance

He continued to live in Palm Beach — supported by financial assistance from his friends — in Villa Mizner, a lavish apartment of his own design, perched above the Via Mizner shops along Worth Avenue. He died of a heart attack in February 1933.

Following Addison Mizner's death in 1933, a memorial service was held at his Via Mizner apartment, his ashes were shipped to Cypress Lawn cemetery overlooking San Francisco Bay, and Palm Beach's Town Hall Plaza was renamed Mizner Plaza.

For the next decade, his litigation-weary estate inched through bankruptcy and foreclosure proceedings while his major architectural works faced post-war oblivion. Mizner had retreated to his Via Mizner apartment after the collapse of the Mizner Development Company's grandiose plans for Boca Raton had undermined his financial stability.

Despite those later difficulties, Mizner's output across the greater West Palm Beach region was remarkable in scale. Although several architects are credited with creating Palm Beach's Mediterranean Revival style, during the 1920s Addison Mizner was the leading architect not only in Palm Beach, but also in Florida. He designed 67 structures in Palm Beach, 27 in Boca Raton, and ten elsewhere in Palm Beach County.

Mizner, who was also an accomplished writer, published an autobiography covering his youth and his days in Alaska and New York, The Many Mizners, in 1932, a year before his death in Palm Beach.

The Historical Society of Palm Beach County, located in West Palm Beach at the 1916 county courthouse at the corner of Banyan and Third Street, has housed exhibitions exploring his legacy, including the show "Building Paradise: Addison Mizner's Legacy," which brought renewed scholarly attention to his influence on the region's built environment. His influence is also catalogued in the archives of the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach, where his scrapbook collection — spanning 25 volumes — covers buildings in Greece and Rome, the Renaissance in general, and such details as cloisters and chimneys, providing a window on his voracious interest in the nuances of architecture and the decorative arts.

Today, the Mizner name endures across the greater West Palm Beach area: in street names, in the continued operation of tile and design studios that draw on his aesthetic, and in the enduring built fabric of Palm Beach County. The Mediterranean Revival idiom he pioneered — with its barrel tile roofs, arched loggias, cast-stone columns, and courtyards — remains the dominant architectural vocabulary of the region's prestige residential and commercial districts.