Diego Suarez
Encyclopedia
Diego Suarez was a garden designer known for his work at James Deering
James Deering
James Deering was an industrialist executive in the family Deering Harvester Company and subsequent International Harvester, a socialite, and an antiquities collector. He is known for his landmark Vizcaya estate, where he was an early 20th century resident on Biscayne Bay in the present day...

's Villa Vizcaya
Villa Vizcaya
Vizcaya, now named the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, is the former villa and estate of businessman James Deering, of the Deering McCormick-International Harvester fortune, on Biscayne Bay in the present day Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami, Florida...

 in Miami, Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...

. He also served as a press attaché and minister counselor for Chile in Washington, D.C. from 1948 until 1952 and counselor to the Colombian delegation to the United Nations.

Family background

A son of Roberto Suarez, a Colombian diplomat and historian, and his Italian wife, the former Maria Costa (1870-1949), Suarez and his sisters, Camelia and Lucia, and brother, Roberto, spent their childhood in their mother's native country after the death of their father. Suarez took courses as an architectural designer at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence
Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze
The Accademia di Belle Arti is an art academy in Florence, Italy and it is now the operative branch of the still existing Accademia delle Arti del Disegno that was the first academy of drawing in Europe.-History:The Accademia delle Arti del Disegno The Accademia di Belle Arti ("Academy of Fine...

. There the young man was taken up by Arthur Acton of the well-known English expatriate family, who was engaged in restoring the gardens of the Acton villa outside Florence, Villa La Pietra, where the formal terraced plan had been swept away in the early nineteenth century by the fashion for English landscape gardens in the naturalistic manner. Acton passed to Suarez, who went four or five days a week to the villa, some of the formal Renaissance garden ideals that were being revived in the late nineteenth century by designers such as Achille Duchêne
Achille Duchêne
Achille Duchêne was a French garden designer who worked in the grand manner established by André Le Nôtre. The son of the landscaper...

.

Through Acton, whose wife was an American heiress, Suarez was introduced into the Anglo-American community of Florence, where he began to lay out gardens, notably, he remembered years later, one at Villa Schifanoia for Lewis Einstein
Lewis Einstein
Lewis David Einstein was an American diplomat and historian.-Biography:...

 and another for Charles Loeser, one of the first collectors of Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...

.

Career as garden designer

In May 1914, when James Deering
James Deering
James Deering was an industrialist executive in the family Deering Harvester Company and subsequent International Harvester, a socialite, and an antiquities collector. He is known for his landmark Vizcaya estate, where he was an early 20th century resident on Biscayne Bay in the present day...

, the International Harvester heir, and his travelling companion and long-term artistic advisor Paul Chalfin
Paul Chalfin
Paul Chalfin was an artist, interior designer, and architect most known for his work on Villa Vizcaya.-Early life:Paul Chalfin was born on November 2, 1874 in New York to Colonel Samuel Fletcher Chalfin and Jane Voorhees Chalfin....

, a decorative painter and interior decorator who once worked for Elsie de Wolfe
Elsie de Wolfe
]Elsie de Wolfe was an American actress, interior decorator, nominal author of the influential 1913 book The House in Good Taste, and a prominent figure in New York, Paris, and London society...

, were lent one of the smaller casinas at La Pietra, Acton commissioned Suarez to take them around and show them some villas they would not otherwise have had access to. Among the Anglo-Americans in Florence was Lady Sybil Cutting, who had the Villa Medici in Fiesole
Villa Medici in Fiesole
The Villa Medici is a patrician villa in Fiesole, Tuscany, Italy, the fourth oldest of the villas built by the Medici family. It was built between 1451 and 1457.-External links:*...

, and who suggested that Suarez accompany her to America.

The outbreak of war marooned Suarez in New York, where he met a likable young Italian with whom he roomed cheaply in Brooklyn but kept up his connections. Thus it was lunching at the Ritz with Mrs. Albert Gallatin
Albert Gallatin
Abraham Alfonse Albert Gallatin was a Swiss-American ethnologist, linguist, politician, diplomat, congressman, and the longest-serving United States Secretary of the Treasury. In 1831, he founded the University of the City of New York...

 that he ran into Deering and Chalfin, and through the old connection he was invited to design the garden for Villa Vizcaya.
Aside from the straight landward approach avenue, less commonly used then than now, the gardens at Villa Vizcaya are centered on two of the façades. One is the boat basin facing Biscayne Bay
Biscayne Bay
Biscayne Bay is a lagoon that is approximately 35 miles long and up to 8 miles wide located on the Atlantic coast of South Florida, United States. It is usually divided for purposes of discussion and analysis into three parts: North Bay, Central Bay, and South Bay. Its area is...

; its central island is in the form of a boat, railed by balustrades that are punctuated by obelisks, with central landing stairs shoreside and bayside, and bosquet
Bosquet
In the French formal garden, a bosquet is a formal plantation of trees, at least five of identical species planted as a quincunx, or set in strict regularity as to rank and file, so that the trunks line up as one passes along either face...

s of trees at bow and stern.

The main extent of the gardens faces south, with a central axis that rises to a casino, and radiating side axes that offer glimpses of the lake beyond their ends. The main garden element, which had been purchased on one of Deering and Chalfin's trips before the villa was laid out, was the fountain from the main piazza of Bassano di Sutri
Bassano Romano
Bassano Romano is a town and comune in the province of Viterbo, in northern Lazio ....

, near Viterbo, which Deering and Chalfin were convinced was by Vignola. Rather than displaying it in the central axis, Suarez sited it at the end of its own cross-axis, not to be discovered until the visitor had penetrated deep into the plan. The design was richly patterned on the ground, with parterres en broderie
Parterre
A parterre is a formal garden construction on a level surface consisting of planting beds, edged in stone or tightly clipped hedging, and gravel paths arranged to form a pleasing, usually symmetrical pattern. Parterres need not have any flowers at all...

in the French baroque taste, contrasts of sun and shade, and many slight changes of level to enliven the essentially flat site.

Marriage

In 1937, in Monterey, California, Diego Suarez married Evelyn Marshall Field (1888-1979), the first wife of department-store heir Marshall Field III
Marshall Field III
Marshall Field III was an American investment banker, publisher, racehorse owner/breeder, philanthropist, heir to the Marshall Field department store fortune and a leading financial supporter and founding board member of Saul Alinsky's community organizing network Industrial Areas Foundation.Born...

 and a sister-in-law of the future Brooke Astor
Brooke Astor
Roberta Brooke Astor was an American philanthropist and socialite who was the chairwoman of the Vincent Astor Foundation, which had been established by her third husband, Vincent Astor, son of John Jacob Astor IV and great-great grandson of America's first multi-millionaire, John Jacob...

. By that marriage, Suarez had three stepchildren: Barbara, Bettine, and Marshall Field IV.
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