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A winter home on the bay
The industrialist James Deering (1859–1925), whose wealth came from the Deering McCormick-International Harvester fortune, built Vizcaya between 1914 and 1922 on Biscayne Bay, in what is now the Coconut Grove neighbourhood of Miami. He began living there on Christmas Day 1916.


An Italian villa, reimagined
The museum describes the house as a modern and subtropical interpretation of an eighteenth-century Italian villa. F. Burrall Hoffman was the architect, Paul Chalfin the design director and Diego Suarez the landscape architect, who made the garden mound, an artificial hill, the focal point of the formal gardens.
From private estate to museum
Deering died in September 1925, and hurricanes damaged the estate from 1926 onwards. In 1952 Miami-Dade County acquired the villa and formal gardens, and in 1953 Vizcaya opened as the Dade County Art Museum. Today it is a National Historic Landmark, run by a non-profit trust and owned by the county.


