3. Marjorie and E. F. Hutton hired an architect and designer for Mar a Lago in 1924
Marjorie Merriweather Post hired Marion Syms Wyeth and Joseph Urban to design a winter home for herself and Hutton in Palm Beach. Their lot was situated on Palm Beach barrier island, with the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and what was then Lake Worth to the west. Today it is bounded on the west by the Intracoastal Waterway. The choice of Urban for exterior and interior designs reflected Marjorie’s tastes in the arts. Urban primarily worked as a designer of stage and film sets, and had been an early illustrator of children’s books. Born in Austria, he was an early exponent of the style known as Art-Deco. Among the other American art-deco masterpieces he designed were New York’s Ziegfeld Theater, and the Paramount Theater in Palm Beach, Florida.
Wyeth designed several of the Palm Beach mansions erected by the rich during the 1920s, but the project for Marjorie became his grandest. Post paid a $7 million commission for the design and construction of the mansion. Wyeth selected a Spanish Colonial Revival exterior design, with the house covering 62,500 square feet. It remains the second-largest mansion in the state of Florida, surpassed only by another, Versailles, an 85,000 square foot behemoth. It took three years to complete the mansion, intended as the winter home of Post and Hutton, with their primary residences being in New York and aboard their yachts, a succession of vessels named Hussar, followed by a Roman numeral indicating its position in the succession.