Gold Coast to Bok Tower: Three Days of Florida's Past

Henry Flagler's 55-room Beaux-Arts palace, built in 1902 as a wedding gift to his third wife, is the defining monument of South Florida's Gilded Age. Flagler — who co-founded Standard Oil with John D. Rockefeller — used his fortune to build the Florida East Coast Railway and a chain of resort hotels that transformed an untamed subtropical peninsula into the vacation paradise of the American wealthy. Whitehall's 75 rooms include the original Louis XV ballroom, a foyer modeled on Versailles' Hall of Mirrors, and Flagler's private railcar Rambler. The museum offers one of the most vivid portraits of Gilded Age ambition and excess anywhere in the South.

One of the Southeast's finest art museums, with 8,000+ works spanning French Impressionism, American modernism, and 5,000 years of Chinese art. A 2019 Norman Foster expansion added a landmark glass-roofed sculpture garden. The photography collection — Ansel Adams, Man Ray, Cindy Sherman — is a particular strength.

Addison Mizner's four-block Mediterranean Revival masterpiece — whitewashed stucco, hidden vias, bougainvillea archways, and the most concentrated wealth per square foot in Florida. Walk the vias even if you don't intend to shop; the architecture is the attraction.

Built in 1876 on Hutchinson Island as one of ten life-saving stations established by the US government along Florida's East Coast, the House of Refuge is the only one of those original ten still standing — a remarkable survivor on a stretch of coast that has been repeatedly reshaped by development and hurricanes. The Life-Saving Service (which later merged with the Revenue Cutter Service to form the Coast Guard) stationed keepers at these remote houses to provision shipwrecked sailors who made it ashore: each house stocked food, dry clothes, and a boat, and the keeper was required to patrol the beach nightly during storm season. The Gilbert's Bar House of Refuge sits on a dune above the Atlantic with its original 1876 structure largely intact, along with exhibits on maritime rescue history, sea turtle nesting (the beach directly below is prime loggerhead nesting habitat), and the isolation of 19th-century barrier island life on Florida's Treasure Coast.

A thoughtfully curated regional history museum on Hutchinson Island focusing on the history of Martin County and the Treasure Coast from the Seminole period through the early 20th century. The museum's collection of antique automobiles, Americana, and local history exhibits reflects the vision of Sterling Elliott, an inventor and businessman who built his estate on the island in the early 1900s. The modern facility occupies a striking building across from the Indian River Lagoon.

Edward William Bok was a Dutch-born Pulitzer Prize-winning author and editor of Ladies' Home Journal who fell in love with Florida and decided to create a gift for the American people. In 1929 he dedicated Bok Tower Gardens on Iron Mountain — at 298 feet, the highest point on the Florida peninsula — with a 205-foot Art Deco and Gothic Revival carillon tower that he called 'a spot of beauty second to none in the country.' The Singing Tower, designed by architect Milton Dyer in pink and gray Georgia marble with intricate bronze doors, houses a 60-bell carillon that gives free daily concerts at 1pm and 3pm. The 50-acre garden landscape was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. — son of the designer of Central Park — in a naturalistic style that blends pine flatwoods, azalea-lined walks, magnolia allées, and reflecting pools. Bok's pink marble mausoleum is at the tower's base. The adjacent Pinewood Estate (1930) is one of the finest examples of Mediterranean Revival domestic architecture in central Florida. This is the most unexpected great garden in the American Southeast — almost completely unknown to visitors who haven't been sent here by someone who has.

Wander the quieter sections in the afternoon — gardens reveal different colours and scents as the day cools.

Charles Austin Buck's 1930 Mediterranean Revival winter estate adjacent to the gardens is a rare surviving example of 1930s upper-class Florida domestic architecture. The 20-room house is furnished with original period pieces and its own garden of roses, herbs, and tropical plantings. Guided tours run several times daily and reveal the social world of wealthy northerners who wintered in central Florida before the Gold Coast became fashionable.

A classic Florida fish camp on the edge of Lake Wales — catfish, hush puppies, fried shrimp, and sweet tea. Eat a real meal before the 3-hour drive south to Miami; the alternatives on US-27 are fast food.