Set on a verdant 50-acre estate along the shoreline of Coconut Grove, Vizcaya was conceived as a subtropical interpretation of 18th-century Italian villas, particularly those of the Veneto region. (The primary influence on the façade was the Villa Rezzonico at Bassano del Grappa.) Built between 1914 and 1922, it was the winter home of James Deering, heir to the Deering Harvester Company fortune.
Deering relied on three men to develop his mansion: architect F. Burrall Hoffman, landscape architect Diego Suarez, and Paul Chalfin, a painter, art curator and interior designer, who became the project’s impresario. (Chalfin had been an employee of Elsie de Wolfe, the woman who, according to The New Yorker magazine, “invented interior design as a profession.”)
