At the gates of Vizcaya you face the most astonishing private residence ever built in Florida and one of the great Gilded Age estates in America. James Deering, heir to the International Harvester fortune, began construction in 1914 and completed the main house in 1916, employing a thousand workers — a tenth of Miami's entire population at the time — to build an Italian Renaissance palazzo on ten acres of Biscayne Bay waterfront. The architect was F. Burall Hoffman Jr.; the interiors were designed by Paul Chalfin, who ransacked European antique markets for authentic Renaissance and Baroque furnishings.
Deering used the estate only a few months per year, spending winters here in a simulacrum of sixteenth-century European aristocratic life while his hundred-person staff maintained the illusion. After his death in 1925, the estate passed through several hands before Dade County acquired it in 1952. Today it is a museum open to the public.
The formal gardens — terraces, fountains, grottos, and a stone barge anchored in the bay as a breakwater — are extraordinary. The house itself is a fantasia: room after room of European antiques assembled by a bachelor industrialist who wanted, essentially, to become a Renaissance prince in the subtropics.