Eccentric James Deering built Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Coconut Grove around 1916 to resemble a slice of Renaissance Italy. The villa's rooms are filled with sumptuous gilt-edge furnishings, while the landscaped estate features 17th-century style formal gardens and sculptures.
Overlooking Miami's Biscayne Bay and surrounded by Florida's hammock jungle, the garden is an extraordinary juxtaposition of the formality and structure of the Italianate Old World with the tropical setting of the New World. The result is flamboyant, exotic, lush, decadent and elegantly camp.
The garden is fan-shaped and is filled with pools, fountains, sculptures and deliciously cool shell-lined grottoes. The most original feature of the garden is the way in which Suarez transformed the awkward breakwater at the bay front of the house into a royal barge made of stone.