Bonnet House and Evelyn Bartlett

Tucked between the high-rises of the beach sits a rambling plantation-style house on thirty-five acres of jungle garden, one of the last stretches of barrier island in South Florida left the way nature made it. This is Bonnet House, named for the yellow bonnet lily that blooms in its wetlands. The land was bought in eighteen ninety-five by a Chicago lawyer named Hugh Taylor Birch, who gave it to his daughter Helen and her husband, the artist Frederic Clay Bartlett, as a wedding gift in nineteen nineteen.

Bartlett, a painter and a self-taught architect, designed the house himself around his own idea of Caribbean plantation style, and filled it with murals, whimsy, and color. Helen died in nineteen twenty-five, and Bartlett later married Evelyn Fortune Lilly, the former wife of the pharmaceutical heir Eli Lilly. Evelyn became a painter in her own right, taking up the brush after seventy, and she and Frederic wintered here until his death in nineteen fifty-three.

It is Evelyn who saved the place. In nineteen eighty-three she gave Bonnet House to a preservation trust, a donation described at the time as the largest charitable gift in Florida history, so that this green survivor would never be paved over.