By Christine Davis, Palm Beach Daily News
The homeowners and landscape architect who restored the famous gardens of Palm Beach’s Villa Giardino have been honored by the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach.
It was a case of serendipity when John Jeffry and Elizabeth Louis first saw historic Villa Giardino — and just as importantly, its remarkable gardens — near Worth Avenue in Palm Beach.
“We stumbled upon it,” Jeffry Louis recalls. “We feel so blessed.”
It was 2021, and the couple was not looking to buy a home in Palm Beach. But as sometimes happens, things changed quickly.
“It was providence,” Elizabeth says, recalling how a longtime friend from Chicago, Palm Beach real estate agent Lisa Cregan, took her to the property at 341 Peruvian Ave., just east of Cocoanut Row.
Once Elizabeth stood before the villa’s open door and the 1920s-era residence and gardens unfolded before her, “it was un coup de foudre, an immediate love affair,” Elizabeth says.
Her husband soon learned about the house from his wife.
“I was in London and Elizabeth sent me a message that this place was incredible, with a picture (of the gardens from the second-floor loggia), but that it was too big a project for us,” Jeffry says.
Yet even from that photo, the property’s appeal proved too potent for him: “I wrote back, ‘Let’s buy it.’”
They did just that — and were soon putting into place plans to restore the house and gardens.
Four years later, the Louises and their landscape architect, Mario Nievera of Nievera Williams Design, accepted the Palm Beach Preservation Foundation’s annual Lesly S. Smith Landscape Award.
The early-evening ceremony in late March took place in the main section of Villa Giardino’s Italianate garden, which is hidden behind a tall wall that fronts Peruvian Avenue. The wall is punctuated by a picturesque metalwork gate set into a Palladian-style brick-accented arch.
“I knew the house — everyone does,” Nievera says. “It’s apparently the most photographed façade in Palm Beach. And it is true, when walking out there any day, I see someone there taking a photo or a photoshoot happening.”
But he had never been inside the gate, he adds.
“I knew certain things about it, and when I was invited inside to meet Elizabeth, she asked as we walked around, ‘What would you do (to the gardens) if I hired you?’”
Nievera, who knows a good thing when he sees it, had a ready response even if it wouldn’t prove quite accurate. He told her he wouldn’t change a thing.
“There were a lot of existing elements in the garden that I thought were worth keeping, so many that I thought we should just work around the elements and make improvements.
“I thought I was talking myself out of a job, and I left — but Elizabeth thought that I gave the right answer.”
With the project completed, Jeffry acknowledges that Nievera had exactly the right idea from the get-go.
“The most important thing we did are all the things we didn’t do,” says Jeffry, a board member of Gannett, which owns the Palm Beach Daily News and The Palm Beach Post among its newspaper holdings.
Elizabeth adds: “Mario has a sophisticated eye and he has a gentle touch. He is very sensitive and discerning.”
In 2021, the town deemed the villa to be a historically significant building, a designation that signals that a house contributes to a neighborhood’s architectural character but doesn’t necessarily qualify for the more stringent “landmark” designation. The program for historically significant buildings offers qualifying homeowners who want to renovate more leeway from the town’s strict zoning rules than if they were starting from scratch.
The garden was originally developed in the late 1920s by Manhattan antiques dealer Ohan Berberyan. In 1931, with architect Marion Sims Wyeth, he built a showroom with a second-floor apartment. The building featured reassembled architectural elements imported from Venice.
Berberyan opened the landscape to the public in the 1930s as a tourist attraction named Berberyan Gardens. Later, the building was turned into a single-family residence, with an addition in the 1960s attributed to Belford Shoumate.