Life’s a beach – and the art’s good, too

of Palm Beach County, also known as the Palm Beaches. The wider area comprises 39 cities and towns, including Jupiter, West Palm Beach, Lake Worth, Wellington, Boca Raton, Delray Beach and, of course, Palm Beach. Each area has a distinctive personality. For example, affluent

Boca Raton is where bands of retirees and their preppy progeny reside, while West Palm is younger, hipper and more down-to-earth.

West Palm, the county seat of the Palm Beaches, is home to the Norton Museum of Art (norton.org), which reopens today after a $100 million

(£77 million) expansion with a new wing, galleries and a sculpture garden designed by British architect Lord Norman Foster. On my visit, pictures were still being hung and the huge sculpture Typewriter Eraser, Scale X by Claes Oldenburg was being set in a reflecting pool by the front entrance on South Dixie Highway. Next to the installation, a hulking 80-year-old banyan tree, which Lord Foster calls the building’s “protagonist”, seems to have stood the test of time.

The Pritzker Prize-winning architect believes that the Norton will put the Palm Beaches firmly on the art map. “Florida is America’s third most populous state after California and Texas,” said Lord Foster. “It doesn’t really have, given its importance in the grand scheme of things, quite the same number of cultural institutions that the two other states have. The reopening of the Norton fills a long-awaited need for such a museum.”

Neighbouring Miami Beach, which is only an hour’s train ride away, often takes the limelight when it comes to the art world but things are set to change.

“Certainly when it comes to art, Miami, which hosts important fairs including Art Basel and Art Week, takes centre stage. But hopefully the reopening of the museum cements Palm Beaches’ place as a serious art destination.”

Inside, stark white halls feature an impressive collection spanning the old masters, Americana and contemporary art, including new work from Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer and Ed Ruscha alongside early modern paintings from Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin.

The galleries look out on to the expansive sculpture garden lined with mahogany and tamarind trees and tropical flowers in reds and oranges. Birds of paradise and heliconia compete for attention with 16 modern and contemporary sculptures by artists such as Keith Haring, George Rickey and Mark di Suvero.

The garden – the first to be designed by Lord Foster – took inspiration from the area’s lush vegetation. “When I first visited Palm Beach County, I visited art collectors at their private homes,” he said. “I noticed how their gardens were part of the architecture and the DNA of their home and of the area as a whole. I was impressed by how lush everything was, how monumental the hedges were. It was a different scale of garden and had a subtropical quality. I wanted to take something cultivated in a private domain and recreate it for public enjoyment and pleasure.”

In the nearby neighbourhood of El Cid lies another fine example of a museum garden. Hidden among 250 rare palm species, cycads and tropical plants are nine monolithic sculptures rendered in granite, brick, marble and bronze by artist Ann Norton (ansg.org).

I wandered through the grounds and took pleasure in stumbling upon sculptures in a seeming tangle of trees, shrubbery and underbrush. Rather delightful is the hulking Cluster, seven figures cast in pink Norwegian granite. Towards the back of the estate

Norton’s studio remains intact, complete with the tools she used, works in progress and various studies. Beyond the gardens and studio were views of glittering Lake Worth.

Barcelona Road, the street where the sculpture garden is nestled, is as much of a highlight. The road, together with other streets spanning Flagler Drive, form part of El Cid, a waterfront neighbourhood lined with 281 historic buildings and homes built in various architectural styles from Mediterranean revival and Spanish mission to art deco and Monterey (a style characterised by two storeys, exterior balconies, adobe walls and a low-pitched gable roof).

I walked along the street, captivated by the houses painted in various shades of yellow, pink and cream and the manicured lawns, which were like miniature tropical jungles with mature fruit and palm trees at every turn and orchids, bromeliads and bougainvilleacovered pergolas. This had to be one of my favourite streets in the world.

I ambled further along South Flagler Drive towards Lake Trail into Flagler Museum (flaglermuseum.us), a 75-room mansion built in 1902, during America’s Gilded Age, by Henry Flagler, a Rockefeller crony and industrialist often referred to as the father of Miami and Palm Beach. It was Flagler who saw the potential in the Palm Beaches and transformed these swampy backwaters into the

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