FLORIDA BUILDINGS I LOVE: No. 79: Boca Raton Resort & Club, 1926, Boca Raton

There’s a lot to love at the Boca Raton Resort & Club, but the architectural and historical pedigree is rooted in its original building, originally called the Cloister Inn and now simply called the Cloister.

This Mediterranean Revival palace of just 100 guest rooms was the dream — and partly the demise — of architect Addison Mizner.

Mizner was the most prominent architect of Palm Beach County — and perhaps the entire state — during the 1920s real estate boom. He came to Palm Beach 100 years ago at the behest of sewing-machine heir Paris Singer, and the two promptly built what was to have been a military hospital at the west end of Worth Avenue.

But World War I ended soon thereafter, so the building was converted into a private club known as the Everglades Club, still in operation nearly a century later.

Palm Beach’s elite noticed that Mr. Mizner had a talent for creating elegant, well-proportioned and exquisitely detailed structures and hired him to design winter mansions for them. One of his earliest projects was the Stotesbury mansion, El Mirasol, commissioned by wealthy Philadelphians. He did a number of other homes, some of them still surviving, while others, on large tracts of oceanfront land, were torn down in the latter decades of the 20th century, their plots subdivided for smaller luxury homes.

Mizner lived in a previous “Florida Buildings I Love” selection — the Via Mizner on Worth Avenue, just a few steps from the Everglades Club. Mizner drew upon his youthful travels and eye for artistic detail in perfecting the Med Rev style, mixing architectural details from Spain, Northern Africa, Italy and the Middle East. The result was an architecture that gave “Old World charm” to the just 30-year-old resort of Palm Beach.

In the Florida Land Boom, northern investors wanted to feel as if they were investing in something permanent; Mediterranean Revival buildings looked old and established, even though the painters might have been walking out the back door as the buyers were walking in the front.

Mizner dreamed of being a developer. He looked south from Palm Beach at the tiny Boca Raton settlement and thought he could make it a luxury resort community to rival George Merrick’s Coral Gables southwest of Miami.

The centerpiece was to be an upscale hotel known as the Cloister Inn.

Partnering with the new Ritz-Carlton Investment Corp., Mizner was successful in building it, but the success ended there. As the tuxedo-clad Mizner posed with a cigarette for a photograph on opening night, Feb. 6, 1926, he knew, behind his smug smile, that the boom was coming to an end. Mizner Development Co. went into bankruptcy with little of his dream city having been built.

The Cloister Inn was purchased at auction in 1927 by Philadelphia utilities tycoon Clarence Geist, who was an investor in Mizner’s Boca Raton. He doubled the size of the building in 1930, using the famous Schultze & Weaver architectural firm (The Breakers in Palm Beach, the Biltmore in Coral Gables).

The resort, which served as “the most elegant barracks in history” during World War II, has had several owners over the years. It is now a Waldorf-Astoria-branded property.

In the 1950s, the Arvida Corp. bought it and much of the land around Boca Raton, and the Mizner Dream came true. It was 30 years too late for him, unfortunately, as Mizner died in 1933 at age 62.

Arvida, which developed Sarasota’s Bird Key and much of southern Longboat Key, added the prominent, pink 30-story hotel tower, designed by Donaldson Group Architects, to the Boca Raton Club in 1969.

Former Miami Dolphins owner H. Wayne Huizenga sold the property, now with 1,047 rooms, in 2004 to the Blackstone Group, which invested heavily in expansions and renovations. During a $30 million renovation that concluded in 2014, $100,000 was spent per room on refurbishments.

In the biggest property sale in Palm Beach County history, the Boca Raton Resort & Club sold in 2019 for $461.6 million to a company affiliated with billionaire Michael Dell.

“Florida Buildings I Love” is Harold Bubil’s homage to the Sunshine State’s built environment. This article originally ran on June 16, 2018.