Boca Rococo: How Addison Mizner Invented Florida's Gold Coast

The title of this pleasingly told biography of Mizner--the hulking bon vivant who designed Spanish-style fantasia homes for the Jazz Age elite of South Florida--advances a general misconception about him: though his name is commonly associated with Boca Raton, he actually designed precious little for that town before his sprawlingly grandiose development scheme there caved in, leaving him broke for the short remainder of his life. Rather, the bulk of his work is in Palm Beach, where he designed countless romantic but shrewdly conceived Spanish Revival homes and estates for the old and new rich who flocked to this tropical "last frontier" in the 1920s. Seebohm accordingly focuses most on this output--from the early residence El Mirasol to the latter Playa Riente, not to mention Mizner's elegant Everglades Club and his own Via Mizner, which in a sense was America's first open-air shopping mall. (Photographs weren't available for review, but they will make up two 16-page inserts, unfortunately in black-and-white; Mizner was a master of intoxicating pastels.)

This isn't a rigid, theoretical sort of monograph, but, then again, Mizner wasn't a rigid, theoretical sort of architect--he had no formal training and (critics have noted) he did nothing to advance architectural idiom like the modernists. His genius was the way in which he parlayed a wildly divergent early career (that included travel in Alaska, China and Guatemala) into what became a vast enterprise in which he not only designed homes, interiors, and landscapes of distinct beauty and coherence, but oversaw and trained a virtual army of workers in the art of buying or reproducing Spanish stucco, tile work, pottery, furniture, and more. Adored in both high society and bohemian circles, his friends included everyone from grand dame Eva Stotesbury, for whom he designed El Mirasol, to composer Irving Berlin. He was also wildly flamboyant, uniquely resilient and adept at self-reinvention, and apparently blessed with a heart as big as his waistline. As such, Mizner lived a life as much about all-American pluck and luck in a heady, doomed decade as it was about architectural sensibility. Those two strands are deftly woven together here in a life story that approaches the same tone of genteel fondness that most of Mizner's rich lady friends routinely employed in recommending him to their ever-richer friends. --Timothy Murphy