Addison Cairns Mizner (1856-1933)

Addison Mizner accompanied his parents to Guatemala City in 1872 where his father briefly served as the American ambassador to Central America. Addison spent the year recovering from a serious childhood illness, and learning Spanish and drawing.¹⁾ Brothers Addison Wilson Mizner arrived at Dyea in December 1897. They spent two years in the Klondike and left when the town started to settle down.²⁾

The brothers lived in New York City for most of the first two decades of the 1900s. Addison travelled to Guatemala to buy relics and furniture and shipped the goods to New York to sell at a trendy Fifth Avenue store. Wilson managed the Rand Hotel, one of the city's most notorious places. The bar was designed by Addison who aspired to be a designer. He moved to Palm Beach in 1918 on the recommendation of Paris Singer, heir to the Singer fortune. They built the swank Everglades Club for returning wounded soldiers. This led to further designing commissions. He moved to Boca Ratan near Fort Lauderdale. ³⁾

Mizner worked for a short while in the office of an Beaux-Arts architect named Stanford White but essentially learned his trade by observation, reading and frequent visits to Spain and Italy. Many of his clients were newer to money than he was to architecture. Alice DeLamar was a good friend and patron. Ida M. Tarbell was his 1928 biographer. Addison and his younger brother Wilson became colourful fixtures on the south Florida scene. Addison designed homes for dozens of new Palm Beach millionaires. The brothers were also land speculators, investing and losing fortunes in Palm Beach and Boca Raton just to the south. Most of the ornaments and much of the furniture they sold was made in Mizner's Los Manos factory. He manufactured ceramic tiles and urns in his signature colour, Mizner blue. His style went out of favour due to hurricanes, the Great Depression, and the 1930s new trend to minimalist architecture.((“Addison Mizner - Mad for Beauty.” Old House Journal, April 2001: 35-37.)