Palm Beach Life: In their restored 1929 house, the Fisher family celebrates a historic Spanish revival in El Bravo Park – Palm Beach Post

In Palm Beach, the Halls and the Fishers two families distanced by decades found the need to be modern in the same 16th-century styled house in El Bravo Park, The Fishers have carried out an extensive restoration and renovation that honors the homes past while embracing their lifestyle today.

Editors note: This story originally was published in the Spring 2020 issue of Palm Beach Life magazine.

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During the summer of 1929, when Gracia and Charles Hall drove down El Bravo Way, where their new Spanish Renaissance-inspired house was being built, they might have imagined they were on the Camino Real headed for El Dorado. El Bravo Way, after all, was lined with a constellation of homes with red-tiled roofs, wrought-iron balconies and miradors designed by Addison Mizner, Marion Sims Wyeth, and Volk and Maass. The latter firm had, in fact, designed the Halls house.

More than 85 years later, Frances and Jeff Fisher were set to break ground across town on North Lake Way with plans to build a state-of-the-art tropical modern-style home "with everything we ever wanted," Frances recalls.

Having previously completed an extensive restoration of a 1920s Old World design on Clarke Avenue, the Fishers believed they were ready for fresh 21st-century living.

And then, Frances recalls, her businessman husband said something about their in-the-works house that took her aback: "Theres only one problem. Somethings missing. Its the thing you love most and thats history."

She adds: "He was right. After dinner at Ta-boo, we rode over to El Bravo Way to this classic Spanish house on the corner. Wed been there for parties and knew it might soon become available," Frances explained.

Months of patience and persistence followed before the house was theirs. And by the time the Fishers finished a comprehensive restoration led by architect Clemens Bruns Schaub, they had not only revived the homes rich architectural legacy but adapted the villa to modern living.

Windows and loggias looked onto award-winning gardens by Jorge Sanchez of SMI Landscape Architecture. The result is a historic house in a timeless setting as modern as any contemporary home they might have built.

"The Fishers wanted something historically true yet functional for their family. Also, they were concerned that all inappropriate additions and details be removed," says Schaub. "We wanted it to look like the original architects had renovated it."

Sanchez had worked with the Fishers on previous projects. "For this one, Mrs. Fisher told us one of her favorite places was the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. We translated the courtyard concept and applied it to the center garden," Sanchez explains.

Having a lifetimes regard for historys relevance, Frances who serves as the chairwoman of the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens board of trustees set out to document the house and the lives of its first owners.

"The as-built Volk and Maass-designed plans and specs from the John L. Volk Archive proved invaluable. Also, my friend Allison Haft is related to the original owner and provided me with numerous 1920s and 1930s photographs taken of the house and the family," Frances says

"As masterful and precise as Clem Schaub and Jorge Sanchez were in creating the setting we wanted, Allies family photos allowed us to more closely reinstate lost elements and those subject to untimely or insensitive alterations. The drawings and the photos became the bible for the restoration."

Past lives

From those materials, she discovered more about the couple who had commissioned the house. Gracia Andrews Leath married Charles Hall, a Midwest industrialist, following the death of her first husband Arthur Leath, founder and president of a large Midwest furniture company. A year before the newly married Halls bought their lot in the El Bravo Park subdivision, Hall, whose company manufactured automobile headlights and accessories, had been a houseguest across the street at the Frank Cragin house, also designed by Volk and Maass.

Settling into the social whirl, the newlyweds reveled for several seasons of RSVPs and golf rounds, primarily with the Detroit-and-Chicago set, before the couple split in 1936.

Gracia, with her two daughters, kept the Palm Beach house. Six years later, she sold it to Edmund L. Goodman, who opened Finchleys, a popular haberdashery with an English bar at the Hutton Building on Phipps Plaza in Midtown.

In 1953, the house was sold to Rhode Islander Robert Shepard, who installed an elevator from the family-owned department store in Providence. Shepards father was John Shepard Jr., a former mayor of Palm Beach. His equally civic-minded son and his wife opened the El Bravo Way house for several seasons to benefit The Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Seas house and garden tours.

Then and now

"The architecture," observes Schaub, "reflects a Spaniard who has traveled."

Among the houses original features, an elaborate rose-veined quarry Keystone frontispiece is set apart from the faade wall, adding an uncommon rectilinear dimensional element. Windows piercing the faade on the second floor have wrought-iron balcony railings. The 46-foot-high mirador recalls hilltop 16th-century Andalusian fortresses, while the arcaded loggia serves both as an entertainment area and a passageway to link the gardens to the living areas.

"For us, the houses faade was a major attraction," Frances says. "It was important to maintain the definitive Spanish architectural integrity, connecting it to the other El Bravo Way houses, as well as perhaps 16th-century Salamanca that might have inspired the design."

Although subsequent owners made changes to the house and the patio, including removing many of the original Mizner tiles, its as-built faade and cruciform floor plan remained intact. When the town landmarked the property in 1989, historian Dr. Donald Curl described it as "a first-rate house on an important street."

The Fishers house was one of the last Spanish-style boom-time mansions to be built before the Great Depression ushered in the smaller houses of the 1930s and 1940s. Many of the earlier eras Italian and Spanish houses had been damaged and rebuilt following the brutal hurricane of 1928, losing some of their initial luster in the process. Like its neighbors, the houses structural soundness and design integrity helped set El Bravo Park apart from the towns other subdivisions.

Engineer Frank Clements planned El Bravo Park to accommodate "high-class" houses that were "just short of a Spanish palace with some Italian facets" a far cry from the bungalows and cottages dotting the Sea Streets or the existing Floral Park and Royal Park subdivisions.

El Bravo Parks roots date to March 1920, when Clements bought the ocean-to-lake parcel to the south of the Everglades Club golf course. Clements a retired railroad engineer who supervised the Amazon Valley Railway and the Niagara Falls tunnel system promised first-class utilities, streetlamps, a 700-foot oceanfront seawall and a lakeside Venetian yacht basin.

Swiss-born gardener Louis de Gottreau designed the landscapes, and Wyeth and Mizner were retained to design the first houses in the ocean block of El Bravo Way. The subdivision also included El Brillo Way, one street south.

But two years later, Clements died. His wife, Anna Clements, sold the undeveloped portion of El Bravo Park to Philadelphian Earle P. Charlton, co-founder of Woolworths and company vice president, who followed Clements development guidelines, as did other Estate Section builders.

By 1930, the Volk and Maass firm with principals John L. Volk and Gustav Maass, the senior architect completed two other Spanish Renaissance-inspired houses, in addition to the Cragin and Hall homes. The others included the firms largest Spanish house of that era along the lakefront on El Bravo Way. For that house, Volk and Maass designed one of the towns most distinctive arched entranceways, modeled on the Alfabia, the home and gardens of a Moorish viceroy on Majorca.

Rebuilding history

After a century of additions, renovations and alterations, some 1920s-era houses in Palm Beach are historic in name only. But previous modifications to the Fishers house had not undermined its fundamental architectural or structural quality, making a true restoration possible. Floors, bearing walls, leaded-glass windows and ceiling beams were all intact.

Yet, the house still required a considerable effort to bring it back to its formidable grandeur and make it practical and functioning for day-to-day living.

The Fishers transformed the outdated kitchen, service and storage area in the far southwest corner into an open, ultra-modern kitchen and family room. The second floor also was reworked into more functional living space overlooking the terrace and gardens. This aspect of the project called for enclosing the breezeway and creating office space, an exercise area and more room for guests.

Yet the updates, Schaub notes, were always planned to complement the homes historical character.

"The Fishers always took the right road," he says.

That road led to a house that today is as brilliant and dynamic as it must have seemed to the Halls when they built it. The brillo and the bravo have returned.

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Palm Beach Life: In their restored 1929 house, the Fisher family celebrates a historic Spanish revival in El Bravo Park - Palm Beach Post