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

The rollicking tale of the artist, adventurer, and visionary whose innovative architecture transformed Palm Beach and whose dramatic rise and fall mirrors the larger-than-life excesses of the 1920s.

Addison Mizners Mediterranean-style mansionswith their stucco walls, tiled roofs, and Moorish accentsare much-admired Florida icons. In Boca Rococo, renowned author and biographer Caroline Seebohm introduces the flamboyant genius behind these pastel palaces.

Mizner was a leading San Francisco society figure in the 1890s, joined the Alaska Gold Rush, traveled to China, and made his way to an exploding turn-of-the-century New York. No formal training but huge natural talent established him as architect of the rich and famous. The getaways he designed made Palm Beach Americas most elegant resortand fed his dream of developing a Venice-on-the-Ocean in nearby Boca Raton. Mizners plans ended with the collapse of Floridas real estate boom. He died in 1933, broken and bankrupt.

Drawing on a huge cache of untapped materialsincluding measured plans and an unpublished autobiographySeebohm restores Mizner to the pantheon of great architects and flamboyant Americans.