Palm Beach Has Been America's Winter Enclave for the Old-Money Set Since Flagler Built It

Palm Beach exists in its current form largely because one man decided it should. Henry Flagler, the railroad and oil magnate who extended his line down Florida's east coast, built the town's first grand hotels in the 1890s and, in 1902, completed Whitehall, a Gilded Age mansion he gave his wife Mary Lily Kenan as a wedding present. That house, now the Flagler Museum, is still the clearest single monument to how the town began.

Mizner's architecture set the town's look

Much of Palm Beach's Mediterranean Revival character, the pink stucco, barrel-tile roofs and shaded loggias, comes from architect Addison Mizner, who worked across the town in the 1910s and 1920s. Mizner and impresario Paris Singer also founded the Everglades Club in 1919, a private club that remains one of the town's most exclusive addresses and a good marker of how deliberately the town's social architecture was built, not accumulated by accident.

The hotel that has anchored the town for over a century

The Breakers, built by Flagler and rebuilt in its current Italian Renaissance style after a 1925 fire, has operated on the same oceanfront site since the town's earliest years and remains its most recognisable hotel, a fixture of the winter season rather than a recent arrival chasing it.

A street built for looking, not just shopping

Worth Avenue, laid out in the 1910s and 1920s with Mizner's involvement, has functioned as the town's main promenade for a century, its arcades and courtyards designed as much for walking and being seen as for the boutiques lining it. Palm Beach's winter season, roughly November to April, remains when the town's year-round population multiplies and its social calendar is at its fullest.

Traveller tips

• Palm Beach International Airport sits just across the Intracoastal Waterway, making the town one of the more accessible old-money enclaves in the United States.
• The Flagler Museum, housed in Whitehall, is open to the public and gives the clearest sense of the town's founding era.
• Worth Avenue's courtyards, tucked behind the main street's storefronts, are easy to miss but worth the detour.
• The town is quietest in summer, when much of its seasonal population relocates north.