Vizcaya Museum and Gardens

James Deering was an executive and heir of the family behind International Harvester, the farm-machinery giant, and by the early twentieth century he was enormously wealthy and in fragile health. Advised to winter in a warm climate, he chose Miami, then a young frontier city, and set out to build a lavish estate on Biscayne Bay where he could escape the northern cold.

Construction of the main house took place mainly in the mid-1910s, and it employed a huge share of Miami's workforce at the time, a major undertaking in a city that was barely two decades old. Deering conceived Vizcaya as a work of imagination as much as a home, and he and his team crafted an elaborate fiction that the villa was an ancient family seat, remodeled over centuries, to explain its mix of styles and its trove of European antiques.

The main house is built around an open central courtyard and designed in the manner of a Renaissance-era Italian villa, with rooms decorated in styles ranging across several centuries of European taste. Deering filled it with genuine antiques and architectural elements bought from old European buildings: ceilings, doorways, tapestries, furniture, and art assembled to give the house the feel of a place with a long and layered past.

For all its historical dress, Vizcaya was also thoroughly modern for its day, equipped with the conveniences of an early twentieth-century mansion behind its antique facade. The blend of old-world atmosphere and up-to-date engineering reflects the ambitions of its era, when American industrial fortunes were used to import the grandeur of Europe onto new-world shores.

Outside, the formal gardens are among the finest of their kind in the country, an Italian and French inspired landscape of terraces, fountains, pools, statuary, and clipped greenery set against the backdrop of the bay. They were carefully designed to work in the subtropical climate, using hardy plants shaped to evoke the classical gardens of Europe, and they remain a favorite for weddings and quiet walks.

The estate's most whimsical feature sits just offshore. A great carved stone breakwater in the shape of a barge floats in the water beyond the east terrace, decorated with sculptures and once serving as both an ornament and a shield against the waves. Around the manicured grounds, Vizcaya also preserves a stretch of native South Florida hardwood hammock and mangrove shoreline, a reminder of the wild landscape the estate was carved from.

James Deering enjoyed his estate for only a handful of winters before his death in the mid-1920s, and the property later suffered damage from the powerful 1926 hurricane that struck Miami. Over the following decades much of the original acreage was sold off, but the core of the estate, the villa and its main gardens, survived and eventually passed into public hands.

Today Vizcaya is a museum operated for the public, a National Historic Landmark, and one of Miami's most cherished cultural sites. It offers a window into the Gilded Age dreams that shaped early Miami and a rare green, historic refuge in a city known for its modern skyline. The ongoing work of preserving the aging villa, its collection, and its gardens against the tropical climate is a story in itself.

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