Self Guided Tour: Stone House

CHARLES DEERING
In 1916, industrialist Charles Deering began purchasing the town of Cutler and turned its hotel, the Richmond Cottage, into his winter home. At the time, Mr. Deering had recently transformed an old hospital and group of fishermen’s houses along the Mediterranean coast, near Barcelona, into a palatial mansion called Marycel and was working to restore his medieval Spanish castle, Tamarit.

By 1921, Deering was ready to make a permanent move to South Florida and wished to bring a little of Spain with him. He requisitioned a Mediterranean Revival Stone House to be built within the original lot lines of the Richmond property.

“The Deering home…was a warm and inviting place, beautiful, obviously a place of unpretentious wealth and fine taste.”   
-- Mary Warren Hudson, neighbor

The Stone House would feature 18-inch thick, reinforced concrete walls, covered in limestone veneer to imitate the rugged, exposed stone of Tamarit. It would also have a roof of handmade clay tiles, antique wrought iron window grilles, bronze and copper-clad doors and arcades of hand-carved columns.

Deering lived in the Stone House for five years before passing away in his second-floor bedroom at the age of seventy-five.

THE DEERING COLLECTION
Charles Deering was considered a good amateur artist and was an astute collector of fine art and antiques. He filled his palaces with paintings by Goya, El Greco and Velazquez, in addition to works by his contemporaries: Catalan modernist Ramon Casas, Swedish impressionist Anders Zorn and America portraitist John Singer Sargent.

When Deering lived in the Stone House and Richmond Cottage, inventories showed that the rooms were filled with antique Chinoiserie and Chippendale furniture and with artwork by Edgar Degas, Justus Sustermans and James McNeill Whistler among others.

Deering loaned the major portion of his collection to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1922, and his daughters donated it to the Institute after his death in 1927. By the time the Deering Estate at Cutler was purchased by the State of Florida, Charles Deering’s heirs had donated, sold or removed the contents of the houses. The buildings were relatively empty when Hurricane Andrew devastated the Estate on August 24th, 1992. Family members, Beverly Bledsoe Danielson and Jocelyn Tenille, donated artwork and other items from the Deering Collection to the Estate in celebration of the Estate’s reopening in 1999, seven years after the storm.