R and I had an incredible morning touring the Vizcaya Museum & Gardens. Villa Vizcaya, now named the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, is the former estate and winter residence of businessman James Deering, of the Deering McCormick-International Harvester fortune. Built between 1914 and 1922 in the Coconut Grove area of Miami, the estate was entirely surrounded by subtropical forest on the shores of Biscayne Bay. Vizcaya was conceived as a modern and subtropical interpretation of an eighteenth-century Italian villa, in particular the country estates of the Veneto and Tuscan region of northern Italy. The architecture was designed in the Mediterranean Revival architecture style with Baroque elements. Its designers adapted traditional Mediterranean architectural elements with the Courtyard, the heart and main living area of the house, which originally opened to the sky. Deering wanted Vizcaya to be approached and seen from the sea, and the east facade on the bay is the most monumental. It opens onto a wide terrace that descends toward the water. The other sides of the house have unique relationships with the surrounding grounds: the west facade, which has greeted visitors since Deering’s time, is simple and contrasts with Vizcaya’s elaborate interiors; the north facade accommodates one of Vizcaya’s most delightful inventions, the swimming pool, which emerges from vaulted arches at the lower level of the house; the south facade opens onto the formal gardens with enclosed loggias on the first and second floors. On the first floor, several reception rooms, the Library, the Music Room, and the Dining Room surround the Courtyard. The second floor housed Deering’s personal suite of rooms and guest bedrooms as well as a Breakfast Room and the Kitchen. The interiors of the Main House were meant to suggest the passing of time and the layered accumulation of artifacts and memories. The rooms were designed around objects acquired in Italy and assembled into new compositions by designer Chalfin. Vizcaya was equipped with heating and ventilation, two elevators, a dumbwaiter, a central vacuum-cleaning system and a partly automated laundry room. Both the house’s aesthetic significance and modern efficiency were celebrated in architectural and engineering magazines of the time. Miami-Dade County now owns the Vizcaya property, as the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, which is open to the public.
