Vizcaya Museum and Gardens★5.0

How to Get There

Overview

Vizcaya Museum and Gardens is the former winter estate of industrialist James Deering, set on Biscayne Bay in Miami's Coconut Grove neighborhood. Built primarily between 1914 and 1922 in the Mediterranean Revival style with Italian Renaissance and Baroque influences, the villa pairs European grandeur with a South Florida setting — imported garden layouts and Cuban limestone stonework alongside palms and native plantings that never grew in the Tuscan and French gardens that inspired them. Deering used Vizcaya as his winter home from 1916 until his death in 1925; Miami-Dade County acquired the estate in 1952, and it's operated as a public museum ever since.

The Villa & Gardens

The estate spans 50 acres, including about 10 acres of formal Italian Renaissance gardens and 40 acres of native forest along the bay. Inside, the villa's more than seventy rooms hold antiques and decorative art spanning the 15th through early 19th centuries. Architect F. Burrall Hoffman designed the villa — its facade modeled partly on Italy's Villa Rezzonico, earning Vizcaya the nickname "Hearst Castle of the East" — while art director Paul Chalfin oversaw its interiors and collections and landscape architect Diego Suarez laid out the gardens. Vizcaya was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1994.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Vizcaya Museum and Gardens", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0