Kristina WebbPalm Beach Daily News
A major multimillion-dollar renovation and expansion at one of Palm Beach’s cultural campuses is getting closer to becoming reality.
The long-awaited $200 million updates to two aging buildings on the campus of the Society of the Four Arts are part of a long-term vision to create a cohesive experience for members and visitors, after years of assembling parcels and buildings created some space and access issues, Four Arts representatives have told town officials.
The Town Council voted unanimously at its May 15 Development Review Committee meeting to grant second and final approval to two measures: One to create a cultural institution zoning district, and the other to change the town’s comprehensive plan to create a future land use that implements the private group use.
Right now, both the Four Arts’ 10-acre Midtown property and the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum to the north are zoned single-family residential, which has created a hardship for both groups because they have to request multiple variances for any project they pursue, Four Arts representatives have told town officials.
With the zoning district created, the Four Arts has now applied to be rezoned as a cultural institution and to update three parcels on the property to the correct future land use, which should be private group use but remains residential on two of the parcels and commercial on the other.
The Town Council on June 12 referred the Four Arts' requests to the Planning and Zoning Commission. That board will review the project in August, and then return to the council for two readings.
If those changes are approved, the litany of variances the organization would have needed will not be required, saving the group money and time on its ambitious project.
The $150 million plan includes expanding and renovating two of the Four Arts campus’ key structures: The Esther B. O’Keeffe Building and the Rovensky Administration Building.
The goal is to create a sense of place for the Four Arts, from what has been called a patchwork of repurposed buildings to a proper home for the organization’s members, visitors and programs, Philip Rylands, president and chief executive of the Four Arts, told Palm Beach Daily News.
“The only purpose-built building was the King Library,” attorney Harvey Oyer, the Four Arts’ agent for the project as its parts go before town boards for approval, told the Daily News. “Everything else was something else that was stitched together. And they’ve been doing a great job operating it, but these buildings are at the end of their useful life.”
To create the master plan for the project and the revitalized buildings, the Four Arts enlisted Beyer Blinder Belle, an architecture and planning firm based in New York City, to be the design architect, with Spina O’Rourke and Partners, an architecture and interior design group based in West Palm Beach, serving as the local architect of record, Rylands said.
“Beyer Blinder Belle are probably the best restorers of historical buildings in the country,” said Randolph “Bob” Guthrie, chair of the Four Arts board of trustees since 2019. “When you start to work with them, being totally ignorant as I was, you start to see the way they’re thinking and the way they react to requests and criticisms, they’re fabulous.”
O’Keeffe renovation to draw on history
The O’Keeffe Building will receive a significant renovation to expand and modernize the Gubelmann Auditorium and art gallery, Rylands said.
Its use today is far from its original purpose: Local businessman Edward Bradley in 1929 commissioned noted architect Addison Mizner to design the Embassy Club, following the success of the Everglades Club on Worth Avenue.
The club featured Mizner’s signature Mediterranean Revival-style architecture. It had a lounge for indoor dining, a main entrance on its south side and an open patio. But it did not experience the same success as the Everglades Club.
“If you look at the date, unfortunately for them, they opened it in the middle of the Great Depression,” Oyer said.
The building was empty when the Four Arts acquired it and enlisted architect John Volk to renovate it to create an auditorium and art gallery in 1947.
There are many issues that have arisen over the years with the current building and its layout, Rylands said.
The 700-seat Gubelmann Auditorium’s stage is only 15 feet deep, has a very limited backstage area and not enough bathrooms to accommodate visitors, he said. The gallery does not have enough area for storage and care of the artwork, and it ends in an awkward “cul-de-sac” that makes it more challenging to lay out an exhibition, Rylands said.
Volk’s renovation moved the building’s entrance to the north side. Inside, there is a lobby that is thick with ticket desks.
The updated O’Keeffe Building will add colonnades along the north side on either side of the entrance, along with round porthole-style windows that were present in Mizner’s original design, but lost when Volk designed the renovation — though they were part of Volk’s original vision, Oyer said.
“It’s not a new idea,” he said. “It’s actually executing an idea that had already been there.”
The auditorium will lose up to 50 seats in the proposed design, but the stage will grow, and an expansion to the west will create a backstage area with dressing rooms, a catering area, offices, a loading dock and a receiving space. The plans include twice the number of toilets and women’s lounge and a family restroom.
Inside the auditorium, the seats will be pitched to create a better eye line from each row, soundproofing will be improved and the air conditioning system will be updated from its 1940s-era layout to accommodate greater circulation with less noise, Rylands said.
“Right now, there’s sufficient hum that it’s impossible to record musicians,” he said.
The original pecky cypress ceiling from Mizner’s design will be uncovered and restored.
A new box office will remove the current ticket desks inside the O’Keeffe Building.
The gallery area will be reconfigured and expanded, with the space currently dedicated to facilities moved to a site on the campus’ north side, Rylands said. A fourth room will create a more natural flow between galleries, he added.
“With these kinds of conditions, it’s a matter of enabling us to embark in the future on major loans from major museums,” Rylands said.
New life for Children’s Library and Rovensky
To the immediate east of the O’Keeffe Building is the Rovensky Building, a three-story former apartment building that at one point had a car dealership on its first floor.
After the Four Arts acquired and renovated the Rovensky Building in the mid-1990s — making it one of the society’s more recent acquisitions — the organization moved its administration offices there and opened its Children’s Library.
The Children’s Library plays host to year-round events for families, and allows patrons to borrow books and use computers. The facility’s story times are well-known and very well-attended, Four Arts staff have told the council.
The King Library and Children’s Library serve as Palm Beach’s town libraries, Oyer has said, noting that saves Palm Beach residents from having to pay a county library fee.
The current layout of the second-floor Children’s Library is difficult for patrons to navigate, and the stairs to the library are narrow, Rylands said. The building’s original design had a central courtyard that was open from the bottom floor to the glass ceiling three stories above, he said. That courtyard is now the library’s atrium.
The renovations created “a warren-like space” for the library and offices, Rylands said.
The building will be expanded to the north, essentially consuming what is now a staff parking lot, plans show.
The Children’s Library would move to the first floor and have its own entrance on the north side of the Rovensky Building. An entry lobby on the first floor would continue to open to the east, with administration offices also on the first floor.
“Children get moved off of this busy road with a narrow sidewalk, onto the quiet road with a double-wide sidewalk, so they can queue up and not spill out into traffic,” Oyer said.
The second and third floors would house all of the Four Arts’ administration offices, freeing up space in other buildings and bringing all staff to one central location, Rylands said. The existing third-floor residence that is open for artists in residence or staff would remain. The Garden Club will move into larger offices, also on the third floor.
The organization would get a nearly 1,400-square-foot board room on the north side of the third floor, with a 1,629-square-foot terrace overlooking the Four Arts campus, and that space could also be used for events, Rylands said. The move means that Children’s Library will grow by 50%, Guthrie said.
With that much space, story time or a field trip can be in one area to allow the rest of the library to remain open for patrons, Rylands said. The Children’s Library also will include spaces for artwork, with a major donation coming from longtime Palm Beach resident, hotel and casino magnate, and well-known art collector Steve Wynn.
His contribution: Marble sculptures of classic Disney characters Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Pluto and Donald Duck, titled “Five Friends,” by the celebrated British artist Damien Hirst.
Other improvements slated for Four Arts
Once approved to be in the new zoning district, the Four Arts also plans to update its wayfinding signage, with a master sign plan that will need to be approved by the town’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. In addition to requesting the new zoning designation, the land use on two pieces of the property need to be corrected, Oyer said.
Those requests will require one meeting before the Planning and Zoning Commission and two readings of the Town Council.
The plans for the building renovations also will need to be approved by the Landmarks commission, he said.
The unanimous support from the Town Council and Planning and Zoning Commission are unprecedented, Oyer said. Other projects that have made similar requests in recent months — including proposals to redevelop the Paramount Theatre and the former Wells Fargo building — have faced skepticism, denial and postponement from town officials and residents.
While members of the planning commission and the Town Council expressed some concerns about approving the cultural institution zoning district and a comprehensive plan amendment amid the town’s zoning code rewrite project, officials moved the proposals forward with no delay. The Four Arts also rallied its supporters and garnered the approval of neighbors, with dozens coming to the council meetings and sending letters of confidence in the organization’s vision.
“We spent a lot of time making sure that we had the right architect, the right design and the least amount of surgery on these historic buildings that we’d need to accomplish the goal, which is a lot harder than the typical idea of, ‘Why don’t we just clear it, knock it down, build fresh,’” Oyer said. “It takes a lot more effort to do arthroscopic surgery than open-heart surgery.”
As part of that, Beyer Blinder Belle looked at historic drawings from Mizner and Volk, and tried to incorporate some of the ideas of those “founding father architects” into the proposed plans, Oyer said.
The Four Arts has already quietly raised more than half of the projected $200 million price tag, Guthrie said. “We still have people who we think will be very generous, so we don’t think we’re going to have any problem,” he said.
Construction should be ready to begin in the summer of 2026, Four Arts representatives said.
Oyer said he gives Rylands, Guthrie and the entire board of trustees a great deal of credit for undertaking such a massive effort.
“They could have been caretakers CEOs and caretaker board chairs and left this patchwork the way they found it for another generation to deal with,” he said, adding, “They recognized the problem and found the solution. And not too many not-for-profit boards dream up an undertaking of this magnitude that they're going to have to pay for. They’re doing it for future generations.”
Kristina Webb is a reporter for Palm Beach Daily News, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach her atkwebb@pbdailynews.com.Subscribe todaytosupport our journalism.
