Deering did not design Vizcaya alone. In 1910, interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe introduced him to Paul Chalfin, a former art curator and painter who became the project's artistic director. F. Burrall Hoffman served as architect, with Iwahiko Tsumanuma -- also known as Thomas Rockrise -- as associate architect. The villa's facade drew primarily from the Villa Rezzonico, designed by Baldassarre Longhena at Bassano del Grappa in the Veneto region of northern Italy. In 1914, during a visit to Villa La Pietra in Florence, Deering and Chalfin recruited Colombian landscape designer Diego Suarez, who had trained with Sir Harold Acton. Suarez created the garden's room-like sections: the Secret Garden, the Theater Garden, the Maze Garden, and the Fountain Garden, each uniquely planted with exotic species including Cuban Royal Palms and giant elephant ears. But Chalfin and Suarez clashed over finishing touches, and Suarez left the project in 1917.

Vizcaya's genius lies in its adaptation of European traditions to South Florida's subtropical environment. French and Italian garden layouts were executed in Cuban limestone rather than the marble of their models. Floridian coral served as architectural trim. The plantings were deliberately tropical -- palms, philodendrons, species that would have been impossible in the emulated gardens of Tuscany or the Ile-de-France. Suarez designed an artificial hill, the garden mound, as the focal point, giving the flat bayfront property an exaggerated perspective that made the grounds feel larger than they were. To achieve the weathered appearance Deering wanted, the team incorporated mature trees, draping vines, coral stone sculptures, and European antiques throughout the gardens. The effect was of a centuries-old estate that happened to grow palm trees -- a deliberate illusion, carefully manufactured on a piece of land that had been wilderness a few years before.

Deering died in September 1925 aboard the steamship SS City of Paris, leaving Vizcaya to his two nieces. Hurricanes and mounting maintenance costs forced them to sell off surrounding land. In 1945, significant portions went to the Catholic Diocese to build Miami's Mercy Hospital. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 had already devastated the estate, destroying the rose garden when saltwater seeped in and killed every plant. In 1971, jewel thieves stole priceless artifacts, including a silver bowl that once belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte; most items were never recovered. The swimming pool grotto, built in 1916 and featuring one of only two surviving murals by artist Robert Winthrop Chanler, was submerged by hurricanes in both 1992 and 2005. Miami-Dade County has committed $50 million to restoration, matched by grants from FEMA and Save America's Treasures. Vizcaya endures, but every hurricane season is a reminder that it was built in the path of storms.

Vizcaya has hosted events its builder could never have imagined. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan received Pope John Paul II here on the pontiff's first visit to Miami. In 1994, President Bill Clinton convened the first Summit of the Americas at the estate, where thirty-four national leaders created the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The estate has appeared in films from Tony Rome to Iron Man 3, where the casino building doubled as the Mandarin's lair. But Vizcaya's most consistent cultural role may be as a backdrop for quinceañera photography -- for decades, young women celebrating their fifteenth birthday have posed among the Italian Renaissance colonnades and Biscayne Bay views. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1994, Vizcaya opened as the Dade County Art Museum in 1953 and continues as a public museum today, its seventy rooms of antiques and subtropical gardens drawing visitors who come to see what one man's fortune and obsession built on the edge of the American tropics.