Customer Reviews

Palm Beach Splendor: The Architecture of Jeffery Smith

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Wow, what a book! These estates are just incredible, the images are vivid and first rate and the text is very interesting and easy to navigate. Jeffrey Smith really knows how to design grand homes, his houses though mammoth, really fit Palm Beach, I mean one expects grand mansions in this Vallhalla of the truly rich, but Jeffrey Smith's homes are tastful, they are huge, but they fit their environment and are respectful to the neighborhoods in which they reside. Very nice book on a most deserving subject.

This is one of the few books that could be judge by its cover and title. The pictures are excellent and the properties selected are some of the best mansions in FL. I enjoy the many details that are exposed with blueprints and sketches next to their actual pictures. The books include seven of my favorite's houses in FL, an apartment in NYC and other selected properties. If you are looking for a book full of splendor this is the one.

They have this book in the gift-store at the Flager Museum in Palm Beach. So I have perused it a few times, because my husband, after we have seen whatever exhibition convinced us to pay the Flagler Museum's costly entrance fee, always wants to go out near the water in back. So I kill time in the gift-shop, and actually this book has held my attention several times. The houses are remakable by this architect for a very coherent and convincing updating of the rather scattered Mizner aesthetic. It as if Smith distilled the best classy antiqueness from an already all-over-the-place anchronism of the Mizner aesthetic. It is really delightful. But these grand houses on the water would be lost on me, pretty as they are, because being out in the sun next to the water is so unappealing for me. City boy that I am, I can't wait to get inside and close the blinds! Though how many very unlikely former Floridians like myself (and believe me strangely there are a lot of them living in Florida, regularly cursing beaches) can in fact say that they performed a Mozart Piano Concerto with youth - orchestra outside in the blinding sunshine by the water on the grand terrace of Vizcaya, the inspiration for everything historical in South Florida? Somehow the Floridian aesthetic makes all anachronism fungible.