Gold Coast Drift: Palm Beach Luxury & Delray's Village Charm

The 55-room Beaux-Arts palace Henry Flagler built in 1902 as a wedding gift to his third wife is the most spectacular private home in Florida — a genuine Gilded Age monument that has somehow survived intact while the rest of Palm Beach evolved around it. The morning hours (the museum opens at 10am) are the best for the airy marble rooms: before the tour group crowds arrive, the Louis XV ballroom and the foyer modeled after Versailles have a hushed grandeur that is genuinely affecting. Allow 90 minutes.

Four blocks of Addison Mizner's Mediterranean Revival masterwork — the hidden vias (courtyards connecting the main street to alley shops) are the architectural secret that most visitors miss. Via Mizner, Via Parigi, and Via Gucci run perpendicular to the main avenue, each lined with flowers, fountains, and the kind of intimate urban space that Mizner designed for discovery rather than efficiency. Walk all four blocks and all the vias; allow at least an hour.

A free public beach park on the Atlantic side of Palm Beach — surprisingly rare in this plutocratic enclave — with a palm-shaded picnic area, outdoor showers, and a wide strip of white sand. An afternoon swim here has a particular pleasure: the Atlantic off Palm Beach is clean, warm, and rarely crowded at this park.

Morning is the best time for the Morikami's six Japanese gardens: the light slants through the pine trees behind the dry landscape garden, the koi catch the early light in the pond garden, and there are few other visitors before 10am. The story of the Yamato Colony — young Japanese entrepreneurs who came to Yamato Road in 1904 to grow pineapples and silk, who mostly failed and left, and one of whom (George Morikami) stayed for 70 years and eventually donated 200 acres to Palm Beach County with a request to honor his lost colony — is as poignant and improbable as any in Florida history. The resulting museum and gardens feel improbable in the best way: a serene Japanese cultural campus in the middle of South Florida's suburban sprawl.

The most consistently excellent restaurant on Atlantic Avenue — a New American kitchen with a daily-changing menu built around seasonal and local ingredients. Twenty years of consistent quality makes 32 East an anchor that justifies the trip north from Palm Beach on its own. The bar menu is available at lunch; the beet salad with goat cheese and the fresh local fish are perennial standbys.

An afternoon wandering Delray's Pineapple Grove Arts District (NE 2nd Avenue, one block north of Atlantic) and the galleries on Atlantic itself: rotating exhibitions of Florida-connected contemporary art, glass studios, photography galleries, and the Cornell Art Museum inside Old School Square. The public art murals throughout Pineapple Grove have made the neighborhood into an outdoor gallery that's best walked slowly.