Palm Beach design panel: Overly detailed house would be too grand for Seaspray Ave.

A familiar scenario played out this week when the Palm Beach Architectural Commission wrestled with the design of a new home planned for a historic Midtown neighborhood on one of the so-called “Sea” streets.

The streets — Seaspray, Seaview and Seabreeze avenues — are among the oldest platted residential roads in town. And neighbors and architectural commissioners alike can be fiercely protective to ensure that whatever gets built there complements the other homes nearby.

At issue Monday was a Spanish Colonial-style home designed for Robert and Elizabeth Russell for their midblock lot at 318 Seaspray Ave. on the section of the street that stretches between Cocoanut Row and South County Road.

The Russells paid a recorded $9.72 million for a 1920s-era house there in June 2022, courthouse records show, and want to replace it. They bought the property from former Town Councilman Leslie Shaw, who had owned it for nearly 44 years.

The lot measures nearly three-tenths of an acre.

Palm Beach architect Dinyar Wadia of Wadia Associates designed the new two-story house for the Russells. Wadia assured commissioners in his opening remarks that he had designed a smaller house than what was there now, with 4,736 square feet of space vs. the original home’s 5,167 square feet.

The architecture, Wadia said, was inspired by other residences the Russells favored in town. The exterior would feature elements typical of the Spanish style with casement windows, a stucco exterior, metalwork, stone detailing and a barrel-tile roof.

The design team endeavored to position the house on the lot well within the property’s “setbacks” and building-height requirements, added Wadia, whose firm has an office in New Caanan, Connecticut, where the Russells have residential ties.

By the end of their 45-minute discussion, commissioners ultimately weren’t convinced that the house was a good fit for the street and asked Wadia to return to them with a scaled-down and architecturally simplified version.

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The architect’s design seemed to initially find favor with Commissioner Betsy Shiverick, who resides in a 1920s-era Spanish-style landmarked home she and her husband restored on Golfview Road.

“I’m a sucker for Spanish,” Shiverick said.

But she then echoed other commissioners when she said the grandly scaled house appeared too overly detailed to fit in comfortably amid the other homes on Seaspray Avenue.  At issue, in particular, for the commission was a small-scale house next door at 322 Seaspray Ave. That 1919 bungalow-style home was meticulously renovated in an award-winning restoration project finished several years ago.

Neighbors weigh in on design of house on Palm Beach's Seaspray Ave.

Seaspray Avenue resident and preservationist Anne Pepper read into the record a letter written by the owners of the bungalow, David and Jeanne Daniel. The Daniels expressed strong concerns about “the scale and height of the (proposed new) home relative to the streetscape.”

Wadia’s design “appears to be the tallest home with the most mass on the middle block,” the Daniels wrote, using the word “mass” to refer to the way the bulk of the building would appear to passersby.

The Daniels also weren’t fans of the proposed terraced fountain in the front yard designed by Nievera Williams Landscape Design. The design team told commissioners the water feature would help add visual interest to the sloped land needed to raise the ground floor high enough to meet flood-plain requirements.

The majority of commissioners agreed the fountain would be out of character with the house and the street, which is home to 12 of the 22 homes that have been granted landmark protection by the town.

In her own remarks, Pepper said a Mediterranean- or Spanish-style house would be welcome on the street — just not the “very tall” and “massive” one designed by Wadia. Pepper also said she appreciated that the Russells did not want to build a house “to the very maximum size” permitted by the town. The design also would need no code variances.

But Pepper also didn’t like scale of the house or the “overworked and grandiose” front-door entrance with columns and a shaped entablature, which she said did not relate to other neighboring homes. “We would prefer it to be less pretentious,” said Pepper, who also said there would be too much hardscape on the property.

Former Architectural Commissioner Maisie Grace, who lives nearby on the same street, told the board the architecture would need to be “more relaxed in feel” to fit in on the street.

Commission Vice Chairman Richard Sammons, an expert on Mediterranean-style architecture, was among those on the dais unhappy with the scale of the house, which he said looked “twice the size” of any other house on the street. The house also “doesn’t have Spanish proportions — it kind of has tall, elegant proportions,” Sammons said, later adding that it needed “a lot of squishing down.”

House had too much “frosting,” says Palm Beach Architectural Commission chairman

Chairman Jeff Smith agreed the house was “overly detailed” and needed to be simplified. He used phrases that often describe architectural embellishments on Spanish- and Mediterranean-style houses: “Take all the ‘frosting’ and ‘wedding cake’ stuff off this thing,” he advised Wadia.

Alternate Commissioner K.T. Catlin agreed. The house, she said, is “way too grand and much too important in its approach for this street.”

Commissioner Thomas Kirchoff agreed the house would not be in harmony with others on Seaspray Avenue.

“This is just a very sensitive location,” he said.

Commissioners voted unanimously to defer the project for restudy and asked Wadia and his team to return with revisions at their Jan. 24 meeting. Alternate Commissioner Dan Floersheimer voted in the absence of Commissioner Kenn Karakul.

dhofheinz@pbdailynews.com

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Darrell Hofheinz is a USA TODAY Network of Florida journalist who writes about Palm Beach real estate in his weekly “Beyond the Hedges” column. He welcomes tips about real estate news on the island. Email dhofheinz@pbdailynews.com, call 561-820-3831 or tweet @PBDN_Hofheinz. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Design panel calls proposed house too grand for Palm Beach street