Peter Brant and Stephanie Seymour Brant Recast a 1924 Mizner Mansion with Joseph Dirand

Peter Brant hired French architect Joseph Dirand to rework Collado Hueco, a 1924 Addison Mizner house in Palm Beach, days after buying it — and the project that followed took roughly four years, kept the historic walls standing, and turned a renovation into what Dirand calls "a reconstruction saving the historical."

The commission began with a chance encounter in New York. Dirand, on his way into a restaurant, ran into the art dealer Tico Mugrabi and mentioned he was flying to Palm Beach the next day. Mugrabi made a call on the spot. "Peter, my friend Joseph is coming to Palm Beach tomorrow," Dirand recalls him saying. "You have to meet this guy." The following day, Dirand sat across from Brant — the industrialist and publisher — and his wife, Stephanie Seymour Brant, in a house they had owned for only days.

For Dirand, the meeting carried weight. As a young designer he had studied photographs of Brant's earlier homes, including one showing a Jean Prouvé desk beneath a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting, at a time when almost no one set French postwar design against contemporary art. "For me, Peter was a kind of collector's hero," says Dirand.

How Brant built the collection

Brant's eye formed early. His father considered even Picasso "way too modern," but as a teenager on ski trips to Switzerland, Brant met Zurich dealer Bruno Bischofberger, who introduced him to Leo Castelli. Both became mentors. Brant bought his first Andy Warhol painting in 1966; by the time Warhol's business manager, Fred Hughes, introduced them in November 1968, he already owned about seven.

When Brant hung his first Marilyn at home, visitors were shocked. "People would come to my house and think, This is the worst thing I've ever seen," he says. In the 1960s, he counts the serious collectors of Pop art "on three hands." His rule is to collect "something that was in style that's out of style," never as speculation. Between the couple's holdings and the Brant Foundation, established in 1996, the collection now numbers more than 3,000 works — and he has never bought for a particular wall.

What does this change for the house? Everything, structurally. What many newer collections lack, Brant argues, is personality: "You can see right away that this guy had a great adviser, but there's no madness in the collection. Every collection should have some madness."

Seymour Brant, whom Brant married in 1995, collects clothing with the same scholarship — a close friend of Azzedine Alaïa, she holds one of the most significant collections of his work alongside historic couture. Her collecting has even reshaped how Brant sees his own: "It's not a dress in a closet. It's a piece of art, and it mixes with art." Dirand is clear she was integral to every decision.

A 1924 house rebuilt around the art

Brant has spent some 50 years in the Palm Beach area, first as a polo player, and the couple didn't need a new home there. But when Collado Hueco — designed by Mizner, the architect who defined 1920s Palm Beach, for the businessman Paul Moore — came on the market in 2020, the collector took over. "It was a piece of history," Dirand says. "For him, there was no choice."

The asymmetrical house spreads across multiple wings of one to three levels. The main entertaining rooms kept their character; the entrance and stair hall were dark and enclosed. Dirand's move was to let the sunlight that travels across the house reach every interior. Because Florida weather threatened so many treasured works, the team reinforced every historic wall, dug the foundations deeper, set new hurricane-proof windows into concrete frames, and removed and rebuilt the roof — while preserving original tiles and the patina of the plaster fireplace. Dirand immersed himself in Mizner's doors, ceilings, and patterns so the new rooms would read as homage, not copy.

Early on, Brant handed Dirand two thick binders, one of artworks and one of design pieces. "This is what you can use," he said. On holiday, Dirand spread every page across the floors. "I was walking on the paper," he says. The collection came first, though never rigidly, because "a collection is also something that is alive."

Two spaces anchor the home. In the great room, with its castle-grand fireplace, commands one wall a rare carved-stone console by Alberto Giacometti, nearly three meters high, crowned with a female bas-relief, made for Jean-Michel Frank's 1938 commission for the Born family in Argentina — one of a pair, and no one knows where the other is. Beside the fireplace hangs Warhol's 1963 White Disaster (White Car Crash 19 Times), an acquisition Brant had wanted since the '60s. Prouvé furniture from Brazzaville, weathered by the Congo climate, sits amid Native American and African objects, around a mirror-polish copper table Dirand designed himself; Brant calls it a masterpiece.

The loggia keeps its original black, yellow, and turquoise tiled floor and Egyptian-style column capitals. There hangs Basquiat's monumental 1981 Per Capita, bought from Annina Nosei's memorial show for the artist, and stands an early-1960s Ettore Sottsass Tower Cabinet that Dirand admits he didn't understand until Brant showed him how to place it.

Upstairs, Dirand removed walls so the primary bedroom runs the full width of the house, from sunrise over the ocean to sunset over the garden. Seymour Brant's bathroom uses Estremodz-carved — Estremoz marble walls carved to evoke curtains, leading to her dressing room; Brant's bathroom is a white-and-gray marble marquetry built around two Glenn Ligon paintings, a room Dirand calls "minimalist ornamental."

Over years of meals with the couple — "every single piece could be a book" — the collaboration became friendship. Brant's stable included Sottsass, winner of the 2020 Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe. One day Brant called Dirand with news: Sottsass had a son, a young thoroughbred already winning races. He had named him Dirand.