Villa Mizner: The House That Changed Palm Beach

Villa Mizner: The House That Changed Palm Beach is about a grand town palace on Worth Avenue -- one of the world's most beautiful and up-scale streets. The book begins with the famous, charismatic architect Addison Mizner's eight-year tenure (1924 - 1933) in the home of his dreams and includes well-researched, fictionalized conversations with Mizner's famous clients of the 1920s. This period comes to life as it explores the grand palaces Mizner designed for America's most extravagant elite. Sadly, many of the magnificent homes Mizner designed during the "roaring twenties" were destroyed forty years later. The book contains dozens of pictures of the properties in an effort to preserve their memory. Readers will also discover details about Mizner's clients' lives -- all scions of American industry and high society. People like Phipps, Stotesbury, Cosden, Vanderbilt, du Pont, Wanamaker, Duke, Shearson, Chase and Warburton. They will learn of the ill-timed, failed attempt to create the model city of Boca Raton and the reasons why the brilliant, industrialist died intestate, bankrupt and without commissions. The book then chronicles the house's subsequent owners, beginning with Rose and Mortimer Sachs whose tenure spanned four and a half decades (1939 - 1985). This influential couple built and operated a real estate empire in Via Mizner and along Worth and Peruvian Avenues. Readers will then learn about the villa's transition period when it was owned by Ian Kean and, later, Robert and Gay Kanuth (1985 - 2003) The in-town mansion finally ends up in the hands of Dee and Nick Adams, descendants of America's second President, John Adams. This vibrant young couple have brilliantly restored and furnished the house making it look like Mizner just stepped out to dinner. The book brings this villa to life, an amusing and informative history of Palm Beach, Florida.