Luxury Autos & Gilded-Age Heritage

_{Happy Festival of Lights to all the world}

Good Day Palm Beach welcomes D. Robert Stepanian, Co-Regional Director of the Ferrari Owners Club’s Northeast Region and a lifelong motorsport enthusiast. Now based in Palm Beach, Stepanian blends high-performance passion with deep experience in finance. He joins us to highlight this season’s marquee automotive events and share why the world of car collecting continues to captivate both enthusiasts and investors.

A new look at the historic Flagler Museum: The Palm Beach mansion helped establish “the season” during the Gilded Age. Now, it’s unveiling its secrets with a fresh approach to its archives and programming.

For Palm Beach residents, the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum is a reliable diversion for rainy days and out-of-town guests. While repeat visits often reveal new curiosities — cutting-edge thermostats, a hidden servants’ stairway and a quaint tray for calling cards in the drawing room — the museum is developing additional reasons for return visits, starting with unveiling some of its special archives that aren’t regularly on display.

The neoclassical Beaux Arts mansion, fittingly called Whitehall, was the winter residence for the railroad baron and his third wife, Mary Lily Kenan, built in 1902. It helped establish the tradition of the Palm Beach season, and it’s since been restored to its Gilded Age glamour. On the third floor, formerly for the bedrooms of visiting staff, It’s been storing items collected over the years from the house’s tenure as both a private residence and as a hotel, which operated from 1925 to 1959. With guests ranging from the Rockefellers to Walt Disney and Greta Garbo, the building is full of magical ephemera.

Normally, these pieces are tucked carefully away in storage, but under new museum executive director and CEO Amanda Skier, it has begun showing select pieces from its archives for exhibits that reference the Gilded Age, which spanned the late 1800s to the early 1900s and established many modern-day conveniences, including breakfast cereal, bicycles and ready-to-wear fashion.

This season, the Flagler Museum has unveiled a new exhibit on department stores, created by chief curator Campbell Mobley. During a tour through the exhibit, Mobley explained that department stores, which arrived during the period the house was built, offered a new role for women as shopkeepers and a new pastime for the middle class.

Mobley and her team culled representative pieces from its archives, especially pieces of women’s fashion and photographs of famous guests. For the centerpiece of the exhibit, she worked with former Barneys creative director Simon Doonan, who is well-known for fantastical window displays. The Palm Beach resident styled a “shop window” for the exhibit using some standout pieces from the museum’s archives, including a cape worn by guest George Sand — a female writer of the time who was notable for her masculine dress — plus a stunning headdress, a Chinese silk robe and more.

The museum is also planning a number of talks associated with the theme; in addition to Doonan, these include Gene Pressman, for his book about the Barneys department store, “They all came to Barneys”; and author Michael Grynbaum, who will speak about Gilded Age magazine entrepreneur Condé Nast.

During my visit, the house was decorated for the holidays. For the first time, the holiday decorations were created by a professional designer who specializes in holiday decor, Mobley said.

We also (re)visited the epic green dining room, whose wood was restored in 2024. During that process, it was unveiled that the wood was a rare species of West Indian Satinwood and that the coffered ceiling had originally been green. It turns out that the wood was originally much lighter than it has looked for much of the past century, due to a stain that was applied in the 1920s. This project won an award from the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation.

For those with multiple visits under their belt, it’s worth seeing the historic house, and its secrets, in this new way. Campbell said that future exhibits and programs at the museum will reference the Gilded Age, and it will host special exhibits in specific rooms, like the music room, which is a first. I’m particularly excited about an upcoming visit from Kasia Walicka Maimone, who is the costume designer from HBO’s hit show, “The Gilded Age”; while the show has generated interest in the Gilded Age period, it hasn’t yet featured Whitehall. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it might appear in a future episode. It’s more than ready for its closeup. — Maghan McDowell