Located a few blocks from Worth Avenue, and a half a block from the Intercostal Waterway, this historically significant 1924 Palm Beach house was designed by Maurice Fatio, who — along with fellow architects Addison Mizener and John Volk — established Palm Beach’s architectural style.  The house was designed in a Palm Beach Spanish Revival idiom with a Fountain Courtyard facing the street (with a large protected Banyan tree), a center Dining Courtyard, and a rear Pool Courtyard flanked by the main house and a charming guest house.  The house was originally built for two sisters, so it had a “unique” layout: the sisters shared the Living Room, Dining Room, and a Loggia, but both of their bedrooms were accessed by open walkways on the ground and second floors.  Over the years, these open walkways had been closed in, as had the Loggia, and the house had fallen into disrepair.  My brief was to update all of the mechanical systems, strengthen the structure for future hurricanes, clean up all of the previous substandard past renovations, and make it look like it was as Fatio had intended it to be, if he had originally designed a single-family home.

          Picking up on Fatio’s arched French Door motif, I introduced several arched doors throughout the house.  I had the floor in the Loggia and exterior hallways raised to match the level of the interior wood floor, and had matching Spanish Tiles made to complement Fatio’s original design.  I introduced a pair of arched windows flanking the Living Room fireplace as well as a trio of arched windows in the Loggia — indications of which had been made in Fatio’s original plans, but had never been realized.  I created two full “Primary Suites” — one on the ground floor and one above — so that the owner could move downstairs and live solely on the ground floor, if health necessitated.  I introduced a Pecky Cypress tray ceiling for the upstairs Primary Suite, which opens onto a small private balcony with stairs leading down to the pool.  We refinished the entire pool and patio areas with local Coquina Stone.   All windows were replaced with custom Mahogany-framed units to meet current Dade County Building Codes, and a new kitchen and bathrooms completed the design.

         After all of the hard work “modernizing” the house — but in a thorough “historic” idiom — we were proud to receive an architectural award from the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach.