“I love symmetry,” says Carole Mack, whose John Volk–designed Palladian-style Palm Beach home she has shared with her husband, the diplomat Earle Mack, for more than 30 years. The gazebo—Mack’s favorite lunch spot—looks out onto the Intracoastal.

A Richard Diebenkorn painting from his “Ocean Park” series hangs above a Henry Moore bronze in the front hall of a Venetian Gothic–style lakefront house designed by architect Jeffrey W. Smith.

The courtyard of Nina and Pieter Taselaar’s home features Portuguese tiles, while the table is set with Mary Mahoney china.

A seashell mirror detail, designed by Christopher Ostafin, in the Macks’ home.

Villa Filipponi, built in the 1920s for a Chicago heiress and renovated under the guidance of designer Mark D. Sikes and architect Mark Marsh, included a family crest, which was left in place on the chimneypiece in the living room.

*Top,* the pool at John and Britty Damgard’s home, originally designed by Volk; *above,* vintage photographs and a taxidermy fish adorn a room in Duck’s Nest—one of the island’s only remaining original houses, built in 1891 for Henry Maddock and now owned by Julie and Brian Simmons.

A gold-and-black-lacquered cabinet of curiosities in the Macks’ home is filled with a combination of Roman and Venetian glass, shells, and a pair of elephants from the couple’s travels.

The drawing room of Camel House, owned by Katharine Rayner, captures the spirit of the Near East and North Africa with watercolors by her late husband, William; objects acquired on visits to the area; and tangerine-colored walls.

“To me, Palm Beach has always felt like a conjured paradise, and I wanted the house to reflect that,” says Liz Lange of her lakefront retreat—she worked with Jonathan Adler on the redesign. Blue Samarkand paper by Peter Dunham adorns the walls of the dining room, while a vintage Mario Lopez Torres wicker Monkey Chandelier hangs overhead.

The landscape architect Mario Nievera took his cues from the Daniel Kahan–designed house, extending its precise, minimalist aesthetic to the grounds.

*Top,* the living room in Casa Eleda, an Italian Romanesque–style house designed in 1928 for Mortimer and Adele Schiff. Due to its exterior façade of pale coquina stone separated by strips of red brick, resembling the layers of a sandwich, locals endearingly refer to it as “the Ham and Cheese House”; *above,* the garden at Amistad, a 4,000-acre ranch owned by Pepe Fanjul and his wife, Emilia. Amistad usually has about 50 dogs in residence, including Labradors, cocker spaniels, and pointers.

Palm Beach Living

A new coffee-table book surveys the architects and interior designers behind some of the island’s most beautiful homes—and the people who lived in them, from John Lennon and Yoko Ono to Lilly Pulitzer

Back in 1980, when Jennifer Ash Rudick was still in high school, she interned three days a week at the Palm Beach Daily News. Her main job in the office on Royal Poinciana Way was filing photographs.

As Rudick sorted through clippings from Palm Beach’s Preservation Foundation, she came across a shot of Eva Stotesbury, a Philadelphia heiress, standing stoically in front of her Spanish colonial mansion, El Mirasol. The Addison Mizner–designed home, complete with 37 bedrooms and a zoo, was unveiled in 1920 to much fanfare. It would be demolished just 39 years later.

The picture prompted Rudick’s study of Palm Beach’s other unique designs, including Lilly Pulitzer’s jungle-inflected spaces, Charles Munn’s mansion of imposing yet airy interiors, and El Solano, designed by Mizner in 1925 and once home to Yoko Ono and John Lennon. As for the original Bethesda-by-the-Sea church, now home to the designer Mimi McMakin, it was constructed in 1889, and until its deconsecration, in 1925, was the only church in a 50-mile radius.

Rudick soon realized that since the 1896, when Henry Flagler erected the Breakers, the Renaissance Revival–style hotel that first attracted the rich and famous to the island, the town’s history was defined by great architects—such as Mizner, John Volk, Maurice Fatio. In her book Palm Beach Living, Rudick fills 340 pages with images of the subtropical island’s most lavish dwellings, beautifully photographed by Nick Mele.

There’s the colorful villa of Nina and Pieter Taselaar, its interiors designed by the late Carleton Varney, and Lillian and Luis Fernandez’s lakeside gem, designed by the local architects Stephen Roy and Virginia Dominicis, which features pergolas tinted in Yves Klein–inspired blue. Then there’s the fabulous 1928 Italian Romanesque home Casa Eleda, designed by Fatio.

“A commingling of cultures and characters,” Rudick writes in the introduction to her book, the architecture of Palm Beach reveals “kinship and connections across the decades.” —Elena Clavarino

Elena Clavarino is the Senior Editor for AIR MAIL

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