Bonnet House

About this property

The Bonnet House (also known as the Bartlett Estate) is a historic home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, United States. It is located at 900 Birch Road. On July 5, 1984, it was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. It is named after the Bonnet Lily. The property was originally acquired in 1895 by Hugh Taylor Birch, a Chicago lawyer, and given to his daughter Helen and her husband, artist Frederic Clay Bartlett, as a wedding gift in 1919. Bartlett built a plantation-style home on the property and wintered there with his wife and child from a previous marriage, Frederic Jr, until Helen died in 1925. As a memorial to his late wife Bartlett donated his extensive art collection to the Art Institute of Chicago. Bartlett was a self-taught architect; the main house is based on his interpretation of Caribbean plantation-style architecture. Bartlett then married Evelyn Fortune Lilly, ex-wife of Eli Lilly, and they continued to use the home as a winter residence until his death in 1953 and hers in 1997. She deeded the property in 1983 to the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation, which maintains the property as a historic house museum called the Bonnet House Museum & Gardens. The estate was valued at $35 million, the largest single private donation in state history. In 1988 Jon Nordheimer of The New York Times described it as "an unrivaled time capsule neatly preserved from an era earlier in the century when the wealthy elite could afford a cozy 35-acre winter hideaway in Florida." The principal buildings include the main house, an art studio, a music studio and a guest house. They are all of vernacular architecture, designed by Bartlett. The estate is 35.4 acres (14.3 ha). It includes 100 feet (30 m) of beach. In April 2015, Bonnet House officials completed five years of negotiations with the city of Fort Lauderdale to designate the 700-foot (210 m) stretch of beachfront property in front of it private so that it can host wedding receptions and other private events there without having to get special permits from the city. There are five different ecosystems within the property: primary and secondary dunes, mangrove wetlands, a fresh water slough and a maritime forest. The ceiling of the drawing room in the main house is of mahogany from a large log that washed ashore in a storm. A motif of pairs throughout the house reflects an interest of Frederic and Evelyn Bartlett. In 1987, 6,000 visitors took the 90-minute tour of the site. Evelyn Bartlett had a pet monkey and bought 30 to 40 monkeys to live in the trees of the estate. When a local bar, LeClub, that featured monkeys closed they fled to the Bonnet House. In 2014 at least three of them still lived there.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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