Villa Zorayda Museum

Franklin W. Smith was a Boston hardware magnate, world traveler, and passionate amateur of architecture who dreamed of bringing the great buildings of the world to America. Enchanted by the Alhambra during his travels in Spain, he set out to build his own version in St. Augustine, choosing a portion of that palace as his model and shrinking it to the scale of a private home, which he completed in 1883.

Smith was a man of grand ideas. He imagined educational parks lined with reproductions of world-famous buildings, and the Villa Zorayda was in part a demonstration of what such reproductions could be. His enthusiasm for St. Augustine and its potential as a resort helped inspire the far wealthier Henry Flagler, who soon poured his railroad fortune into transforming the city with the grand hotels that still define its skyline.

The villa's most important innovation was hidden in its walls. Rather than lay stone or brick, Smith cast the structure in place using concrete mixed with the coquina shell abundant on the Florida coast, poured into wooden forms course by course. It was one of the earliest significant uses of this poured-concrete technique in the country, and it produced a building that was strong and fireproof.

The method caught the eye of Henry Flagler, who used the same coquina-concrete construction on a monumental scale for his great St. Augustine hotels, including the building that is now Flagler College. In that sense the modest Villa Zorayda was a proving ground for a technology that reshaped the city. Its survival for well over a century is testament to how well the approach worked.

Inside, the villa is decorated in an ornate, romantic style meant to evoke the Moorish world, with carved arches, columns, and intricate patterned detail. Under later owners it filled with an eclectic collection of art and antiquities gathered from around the globe, from Egyptian and Middle Eastern pieces to European furnishings and Asian objects, the kind of wide-ranging personal hoard a well-traveled Gilded Age collector might assemble.

Among the curiosities are pieces wrapped in colorful legend, including an ancient rug said to carry a curse, and other objects whose stories are more folklore than fact. Taken together the collection gives the villa the feel of a private cabinet of wonders, a place shaped by the tastes and travels of the people who lived in it rather than a systematic museum.

The Villa Zorayda belongs to a remarkable moment in St. Augustine's history, when the old Spanish colonial town was reinvented as a fashionable winter resort. Henry Flagler, a co-founder of Standard Oil, extended his railroad down the Florida coast and built lavish hotels here in the 1880s and 1890s, drawing wealthy northerners to escape the cold in a city of Spanish and Moorish fantasy architecture.

That Gilded Age layer sits atop centuries of earlier history, from the Timucua people who first lived along this coast to the Spanish who founded the city in 1565. Walking King Street today, the visitor passes through all of it, and the Villa Zorayda, small and singular among Flagler's grand hotels, is one of the most personal expressions of the era's romantic imagination.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.