The Jet Set's Palm Beach hotel

The Breakers Hotel currently on Palm Beach is actually the third hotel built on the site; the first two wooden hotels burned in fires. The first was built in 1896 by Henry Flagler and burned seven years later during an expansion. A second building re-opened on the site a year later and burned down in 1925, twelve years after Flagler's death. The current hotel was designed by architect Leonard Schultze and opened in 1926. The Breaker's website has an in-depth article about the architecture – if you'd like to learn more click here.



On my visit to the Breakers earlier this summer, we walked from Flagler's home, Whitehall, to the grand hotel, following the golf course down a well-worn trail to the building's impressive front facade. The fantastic interior spaces reminded my quite a bit of Coral Gable's Biltmore Hotel, both in scale and decor. Like the Biltmore, ornate banquet rooms occupy much of the first floor space, and we peaked in to see extravagant, over-the-top weddings being set up in several of the rooms. I even found Ponce De Leon in one of the rooms, as my obsession with finding evidence of Florida's "discoverer" continues.


Feeling a bit out of place in this palace of extreme luxury, Mrs. Ephemera soon departed, driving past the opulent mansions that line the beach in this city full of grand structures. As we turned inland, the song on my satellite radio station played a country song with the appropriate lyrics "we're not the jet set, we're the old Chevrolet set" and we rolled down the road back to Orlando.

The Gilded Age Home of Henry Flagler

Henry Flagler was the man who put much of Florida on the map. His Florida East Coast Railroad kept pushing further and further south until he finally stopped at the end of Florida in Key West (and then he passed away shortly afterwards). Along the way he built luxury hotels like St. Augustine's Ponce de Leon and Palm Beach's Royal Poinciana. For his wife he built a 75 room home known as Whitehall in Palm Beach. Today this 1902 Beaux Arts style masterpiece is the Flagler Museum, and visiting it fulfills one of my goals for 2011. While it's not quite as palatial as the Vanderbilt's Biltmore House in North Carolina, I was blown away at the grandeur and opulence of this Guilded Age home.

The immense mansion, located between Flagler's Breakers Resort and Lake Worth, is in unbelievable shape for a building exposed to the Florida elements for over 100 years. In 1925 the property was converted to a hotel and a large addition was added to the rear of the building. In 1959 Flagler's granddaughter purchased the property back and the Flagler Museum opened in 1960.

The motel addition between the main home and Lake Worth no longer stands

Vintage images from the State Archives of Florida

Flash photography inside the museum was prohibited so I was limited in what I could shoot. The space is incredibly ornate and the opulence of the age oozes from every inch of the building.

The bedrooms all had different decor and color schemes. I call this one the "matchy-matchy room" for obvious reasons.




Mrs. Ephemera and I loved the space created for Flagler's train car, completed in 2005. Reminiscent of 19th century train station, the large room is home to the Cafe de Beaux-Arts from Thanksgiving to Easter. As it was June when we visited, it was not open. Darn, we'll just have to come back again!