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PLACES & SPACES | ROOMS & GARDENS | WORLD OF CABANA
Away from the bright lights, busy beaches and glamorous hotspots, Miami and South Florida hold more than a few unexpected architectural marvels - and not just of the pastel-colored Art Deco variety. Erica Firpo explores some of the finest, including the magnificent Vizcaya, with beautiful images by Carmel Brantley.
BY ERICA FIRPO | ROOMS & GARDENS | 5 AUGUST 2025
Pure fantasy: Vizcaya, a Mediterranean Revival villa lifted from the Italian Riviera and replanted on the shores of Biscayne Bay © Carmel Brantley.
I keep coming back to Miami, and it’s not just to Calle Ocho for El Pub’s empanadas or cafecitos so strong they could jump-start a jet engine. It’s not just for SoBe’s late-night eating, drinking and dancing, or the Design District’s great shops and incredible innovative, artsy storefronts. I come back to Miami because the Magic City never stops surprising me, especially when it comes to architecture and design.
Miami’s architectural heyday didn’t last a few decades - it spanned an entire century. It all began in the 1890s, when Julia Tuttle, known as the "Mother of Miami," persuaded railroad tycoon Henry Flagler to extend his Florida East Coast Railway south. In 1896, the city was officially incorporated, and from that moment on, Miami became a canvas for architectural ambition. The 20th century brought visionary, extravagant, and fantastical styles - stamped onto the subtropical landscape with a flourish that only this city could pull off.
The Cabana Bungalow at The Colony Hotel in Palm Beach © Carmel Brantley
Start with Ocean Drive, where the pastel-hued Art Deco hotels seem to flirt with you from behind swaying palms and glowing neon. The Colony Hotel, with its vertical sign glowing blue against the night sky, and The Carlyle, famously featured in The Birdcage, are just two of the architectural icons that define this stretch. Nearby, The Tides and The Breakwater stand tall with their streamlined curves and nautical motifs. Think of Scarface’s early Miami sequences or the nighttime glamor of The Birdcage, where the buildings are frozen in a jazzy, cinematic reverie—complete with porthole windows and curved façades.
Then head inland. In Coral Gables and Coconut Grove, Miami turns Mediterranean. The city’s Spanish Revival gems - the grand Biltmore Hotel with its Moorish tower, the ornate Coral Gables City Hall, and the whimsical Venetian Pool - make you feel like you've stumbled into Andalusia after a sun-drenched dream. That same Mediterranean spirit radiates up the coast in Palm Beach, where the Colony Hotel, a Med Revival jewel, brings pastel elegance to the tropics, and where Cabana has recently designed a bungalow.
But nowhere is Miami’s flair for architectural theater more fully realized than at Vizcaya. Built between 1914 and 1922 as the winter estate of industrialist James Deering, Vizcaya is pure fantasy: a Mediterranean Revival villa lifted from the Italian Riviera and replanted on the shores of Biscayne Bay. Vizcaya is the grand result of three Italophile dreamers—Deering with his collector’s eye, project manager Paul Chalfin with his curatorial precision, and architect F. Burrall Hoffman with flair—who took inspiration from Renaissance villas, borrowed a few French parterre flourishes, and reimagined it all across 45,000 square feet on the sun-soaked shores of Miami.
The villa’s façade nods to Villa Rezzonico, a northern Italian gem by Baldassarre Longhena, in other words, a palatial pastiche of Renaissance and Baroque influence, . The interiors are lavish in detail and only the very best - from the imported Venetian chandeliers to the coral stone barge in the bay- and all curated to evoke Old World luxe for the tropical setting. The lush garden (originally envisioned by landscape designer Diego Suarez, a protégé of Sir Harold Acton at Florence’s Villa La Pietra) are a tropical fever dream of exotic flora: peach palms, giant elephant ears, Borneo giants, Cuban royal palms, and even a nod to the fantastical with plants like Regina’s disco lounges.
It’s theatrical, romantic, and utterly improbable; the overall vibe feels like the Hearst Castle, only with better weather and more bougainvillea. Vizcaya’s whimsical architecture is Miami at its most enchanted - a dreamy mashup of European elegance and tropical drama that Hollywood couldn’t resist. Over the years, the villa has doubled as a villain’s lair in Iron Man 3, a drug lord’s palace in Bad Boys 2, a VIP party den in Any Given Sunday, and Jim Carrey’s not-so-humble abode in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.
But how did this fairytale villa become a film set? After Deering’s death in 1925, his heirs began selling off parcels of land. By 1952, Miami-Dade County stepped in, saving and restoring the main villa and gardens so that by 1994, Vizcaya earned its rightful place on the map as a National Historic Landmark, and a scene-stealing star ever since.
Detail, the lavish gardens at Vizcaya © Carmel Brantley.
Architectural Bravado like this isn’t confined to the Borders of Miami-Dade county. Travel inland, and you’ll meander through one-road towns that look like period pieces from the 1930s, and drive past random architectural follies and unexpected monuments. My suggestion is to stop. This is how I found Polk County’s Lakeland, a sun-drenched town with a college campus that could easily pass for a set from a mid-century sci-fi film. Lakeland isn’t the kind of place where you expect to find radical architecture.
But there, tucked between a lake, colonial revival homes and stripmalls, is one of the most extraordinary modernist campuses in the world: Florida Southern College, home to the largest single-site collection of Frank Lloyd Wright (FLW) buildings. Commissioned in the 1930s, Wright wanted to design a “college of tomorrow” that broke from the Oxford-Harvard style- that red brick Colonial revival of most college campuses. The result was 12 buildings (plus one completed posthumously) that rose organically from the Floridian landscape, flooded with light and alive with geometry.
At the heart of the campus stands the Annie Pfeiffer Chapel, a ziggurat of textured concrete, stained glass and cantilevered wings. The Danforth Chapel balances Wright’s love of sacred geometry with subtle spiritual reverence plus hosts Wright’s only work in leaded art glass. The Watson Fine Building and Buckner Building anchor the academic core and have signature Wright features like clerestory windows, light wells, and FLW brick, while the Ordway Building is often compared to Taliesin West, with its lines. The long low profile fo the Polk Science Building reflects his modular, organic style—horizontal planes, sculptural blocks, and signature Cherokee red floors.
Getting around the campus means evading the shade, which is why Wright designed the Esplanades, nearly 1.5km of low-slung, covered walkways laced with pierced concrete panels. At 160 feet in diameter, the Water Dome is the largest water feature Wright ever designed. The circular fountain jets water high into the air creating a glassless dome. What’s amazing is that when Wright conceived the fountain in the 1940s, the jet tech did not exist so he never saw the full effect, which was added in 2007.
A walk through Florida Southern College is to step into a surreal landscape and a mecca for organic architecture, built from local materials and shaped to catch the light and breeze. What connects a Venetian dream villa on Biscayne Bay with a visionary modernist campus in the heart of the state? Not style or period, but Southern Florida spirit - bold, eccentric, and entirely out of place, which somehow makes them feel exactly right.
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