A lot has changed. What was for so long a residential space has been reimagined as a new front office for the school, housing the head of school’s office, admissions, advancement, alumni and several meeting areas. The pool has been filled in to make even more space for outdoor community gatherings. The palatial two-story great room has been converted into a state-of-the-art conference space, lined with acoustic panels that blend seamlessly into the ceiling. All the famous loggias (windowed corridors) feel airier than ever, pouring sunlight onto cream-colored office furniture and whitewashed walls. Metal and glass balustrades now flank the main staircase — just one of many elements that bring the house both up to code and into the 21st century. 

“We’ve done a pretty comprehensive remodeling of the home within the confines of what was there,” said former RE Board of Trustees Chair Jeffrey J. Hicks ’84, who oversaw the renovations during his tenure from July 2020 to July 2022. “It’s going to become a gathering place and a center of the upper school in a way that we haven’t really had before.” 

At the same time, countless little details have been maintained or restored: beamed ceilings, weathered stuccowork, intricate wooden balconies. “For such a big space, it’s actually fairly intimate,” said Interim Head of School Rachel Rodriguez. “There’s a history that you feel within it, and I think part of that is because of the architectural elements that were kept.”

The house remains unmistakably itself, infused with that history — which is fitting not just because that history intersects with the story of RE, but because in so many instances it reflects the school’s values. Generations of La Brisa’s residents also believed in “obedience to the unenforceable.”

The story of La Brisa begins with what the late historian Arva Moore Parks has called “the forgotten frontier”: a period of hardscrabble ingenuity among settlers in one of the United States’ last pockets of untamed wilderness. Pioneers inhabited the land throughout the nineteenth century, but the first permanent residents to truly establish a home there were Kirk and Mary Barr Munroe. The Munroes settled in 1887, when “Cocoanut Grove” had had its name for a little over a decade, few permanent structures existed among the dense thickets of pine and palmetto, and sailing was the only way to get around. 

On their honeymoon, they took a cruise down the Indian River and originally planned to settle in Lake Worth, but they fell in love with the Grove when they found an idyllic plot that stretched down from a mound of oolitic limestone into the mangroves and the clear blue waters of Biscayne Bay, cradling a natural freshwater spring that had attracted Seminoles as well as earlier frontiersmen. In the future, Kirk would use it to provide freshwater to U.S. naval barges during the Spanish-American War.

The land presented challenges to the Munroes, who found “rugged rock, primeval forest, dense undergrowth matted with a tangle of pines and palmetto scrub,” as Kirk recorded in a handwritten note. “Suburbs! It is more like a ‘Scrububs,’” he joked — and from that point on, the name “Scrububs” stuck, reflecting a defining tension between the frontier hardships they endured and the civilizing influence they would have.

Like innkeepers Charles and Isabella Peacock and Commodore Ralph M. Munroe (no relation, oddly enough), the inhabitants of “Scrububs” were part of a small cohort of northeastern settlers who had already made money elsewhere, leaving them with a desire (as Parks puts it) not so much to “take from the frontier” as to “give to it.” If that phrase brings to mind the words of one Paul C. Ransom, it’s no surprise: Ransom was not just their neighbor but a good friend whose project Kirk and Mary Barr oversaw from the beginning.

Kirk and Mary Barr were literary people, and one of the things they brought to the Grove was literary culture. Kirk arrived with some fame already as a prolific and widely-read author of “boys’ books.” From a desk atop a windmill on the edge of the property that he dubbed the “Tower of London,” he would go on to write many more, primarily adventure novels and pioneer tales set in subtropical locales that resembled the landscape around him. Mary Barr was the daughter of novelist Amelia E. Barr, and she was uniquely brash and outspoken for her time. Together, they founded or helped found numerous organizations, including the Coconut Grove Housekeepers Club, the Biscayne Bay Yacht Club, and the Coconut Grove Library, which they filled with books from their own collection.

The Munroes helped give shape and structure to the Grove, which was at that point a fledgling community of barely 100 people. But they also held onto some of the most liberatory aspects of pioneer life. They lived in a spirit of openness to others that defied the usual boundaries of race, ethnicity and class. Kirk and Mary Barr welcomed everyone into their home and shared their love of literature with any and all who lived in the Grove, from Seminole families to residents of the nearby Kebo community of Black Bahamians. Kirk was in such frequent contact with the Seminoles that, at one point, he even worked as a liaison of sorts between the tribe and the U.S. government.

The Munroes also took pride in living with the land and pushed to protect the area’s natural flora and fauna. As the first president of the Coconut Grove Audubon Society, Mary Barr was well known for plucking egret feathers off the hats of well-to-do ladies. After a manatee with a harpoon injury washed up on the shores of Scrububs, Kirk not only nursed it back to health but also led a successful campaign to persuade the state to enact new animal protection laws. 

In an ironic twist of fate, a piece of Scrububs’ primeval landscape ultimately played a role in making Coconut Grove considerably less primeval. When landowner Julia Tuttle sent a letter petitioning Henry Flagler to extend his railroad down to the Miami River, she included a box of orange blossoms from the Munroes’ property. The extension of the railroad in 1896 coincided with the building of a new road, County Road (now South Bayshore Drive and Brickell Avenue), that made it significantly easier to move from Coconut Grove to Miami by land. As Commodore Munroe reflected in his memoirs, “If life on the Bay is now more comfortable, food more varied … we should be thankful, and we are; but we may, perhaps, be forgiven for turning an occasional wistful eye back to the times of exploration, or outward in quest of further empty spaces and lonely refuges.” 

Scrububs, however, would remain a place defined by adventure and innovation long after the era of its first inhabitants. Its story was just beginning.

 

In 1922 Scrububs became La Brisa, the Mediterranean marvel that stands there today. But one of the many peculiar things about La Brisa is that it could have looked completely different. With Mary Barr in poor health, in 1920 the Munroes sold Scrububs to John Bonner Semple, a chemist and inventor who had made a name for himself — and a fortune — with the “Semple shell torch,” a device that had allowed artillerymen to fire more accurately at night during World War I. After purchasing the property for $100,000, Semple and his wife, Eleanor, immediately made plans to tear down the Munroes’ rustic wood-frame structures and build a stately house in their place, engaging noted Pittsburgh architect Frederick B. Russell to do the job.

And then, just like that, Russell dropped dead. He died of a heart attack while touring the property in 1921; Mrs. Semple, according to the Herald, accompanied his body to the undertaker. The Semples decided to go with a new architect who had just completed the nearby El Jardin (now Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart): Richard Kiehnel. 

New to the area and also a Pittsburgh transplant, Kiehnel had a vision for a Miami aesthetic that would suit the tropical environment as well as the refined tastes of monied Northeastern snowbirds. Forget the breezy Bahamian and Key West styles of the Grove’s pioneer past, when eccentrics designed their own houses to breathe with the tide and blend into the pines. This was the era of heavy masonry, burnt orange terracotta tile, wrought iron — in short, the Mediterranean. 

Kiehnel wasn’t the first to bring the style to Miami; James Deering’s Vizcaya was already peacocking up the road. But his work crystallized the aesthetic and helped make it ubiquitous around the city. Working with Vizcaya builder John B. Orr, who had developed innovative techniques for making new masonry look weathered, between 1918 and 1922 he built four residences in the Grove that redefined Miami opulence for a generation: El Jardin, La Solana, the Mead Residence and La Brisa. The DNA of these houses would appear again and again in residential and municipal projects around Miami and Coral Gables as Kiehnel himself became more prolific and influential: he would go on to design the Coconut Grove Playhouse, Coral Gables Congregational Church, Miami Senior High School and many more. Arched monastery windows with carved wood balconies. Churchlike chimneys jutting out of barrel-tile roofs. Intricate concrete ”gingerbread” curled on top of imposing wooden doors that wouldn’t look out of place in an 18th-century Spanish prison. La Brisa had it all. 

And the burgeoning city of Miami took notice. The house once again became a nexus of social life in the Grove, this time among a new crop of wealthy transplants who were setting up shop along other bayfront tracts of land known as “Millionaire’s Row.” From their Kiehnel-designed patio with an ornate bench copied from Rome’s Ludovisi Throne, the Semples hosted frequent tea parties, garden parties and evening soirees with 200 guests. The house became a fixture of the society pages of the Miami Metropolis, celebrated for its singular beauty as well as its power as a fundraising venue for local institutions like St. Stephen’s. Its landscaping alone so inflamed the envy of the local glitterati that the Coconut Grove police reportedly led a late-night sting operation to catch a pair of bougainvillea thieves.

After the Semples died, their son sold the house in 1949 to Minna Field Burnaby, a wealthy relative of Chicago department store magnate (and future Field Museum of Natural History namesake) Marshall Field. Minna was a firebrand with a passion for animals, and soon after moving to the Grove she established a Sunday tradition for herself: each week she would visit the Crandon Park Zoo on Key Biscayne and watch a lion show headlined by the zoo’s director and chief animal trainer, Julia Rand Allen. 

At that point, Julia was not just the youngest zoo director in the United States (at age 22) but a kind of national animal celebrity. She had toured around the world with her lion act, catching the attention of magazines like Life and Vanity Fair. She was singular, bold, fearless — the kind of person who earns a correspondence degree in taxidermy at age 14 under a male pseudonym. She preferred to think of herself as a lion “trainer,” she would always say, because big cats can never truly be tamed. She and Minna hit it off. 

And she also hit it off with Henry Field, Minna’s son, who was by then a world-renowned anthropologist, archaeologist and explorer. In the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, Henry led or took part in some revelatory expeditions to the Middle East, including an excavation of Kish (a site in modern-day Iraq) that unearthed the oldest extant stone-wheeled chariot. A species of Middle Eastern viper, Pseudocerastes fieldi, was named after him. During World War II, he also served as “Anthropologist to the President,” preparing special reports on Middle Eastern cultures and societies — those most disrupted by G.I.s on the ground — for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  

Henry and Julia wedded quietly in 1953; after Minna died, they became the new owners of La Brisa. It is fitting that the same home that had once belonged to the pioneering Munroes would fall into the hands of an anthropologist and a lion trainer, two people with a similarly adventurous cast of mind. As it had been in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, La Brisa became an intellectual hub for the Grove, a haven for interesting people from all walks of life. 

“Anybody who was anybody came through that house,” recalled Juliana Field ’72, the Fields’ daughter, who has fond memories of a childhood spent among both nature and ideas. “There was always an air of excitement and electricity, because there was always someone interesting coming or going.” Visitors included Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Robert Frost, Buckminster Fuller and Hemingway’s younger brother Leicester, who lived for a time in the guest cottage — now the Lampen Family Wellness Center — with his family.  

Also like the Munroes, the Fields spent their time in La Brisa advancing a number of civic and egalitarian causes. Julia, in particular, became a champion of any cause “that had to do with people being caged or uncaged,” as Juliana put it. In 1970 she founded Black Grove, a nonprofit aimed at combatting the destructive effects of gentrification in what is now the western part of the Grove. In 1969 she bought a surplus jaguar named Rebecca from the Central Park Zoo and traveled to the jungles of Leticia, Colombia, to release her back into the wild. Seeing the devastating effects of deforestation in the Amazon, she devoted 12 years of her life to conservation in the region, spearheading a sustainability initiative called “Amazonia 2000.”

Henry contributed just as actively to various causes both around the world and in the Grove — including the Ransom School, where he served as a board member and frequent advisor to then-headmaster Pete Cameron.

When RE purchased La Brisa for $34 million (around $7 million of which was financed by a generous anonymous donor in 2016), the price tag was high but the logistical benefits were obvious. The school was getting bigger in exciting ways, but at the expense of the green space that has always been one of its signature features. 

“That’s the danger,” said Hicks. “You want to add so much to our campus facilities – the Ansin Aquatic Center, the Constance & Miguel Fernandez STEM Center, performing arts facilities – but you need to balance the need for open air and gathering places. We are grateful to the many donors who supported this investment with gifts to the school. This acquisition would not be possible without the generosity of our community.” 

That’s what made La Brisa a “must-have priority” for former board chairs Rudy Prio Touzet ’76 and Andy Ansin ’81 when it came on the market: breathing room that would allow the school to grow while holding onto its distinctive character. The renovations have tried to fulfill that promise by preserving as much of the land as possible — the lawn that stretches beyond the house and to the bay will be “sacred,” Rodriguez said — as well as by opening up indoor spaces that were once segmented into domestic nooks and crannies.

For Hicks, however, bringing La Brisa into the fold is also about more than space. It’s a kind of homecoming, a reunion of two places that were once part of the same plot and have grown in strikingly parallel ways. 

“One of the hallmarks of the school is our history, our long-term presence in that location, and the La Brisa home and the history that it has links so well to the history of the school,” he said.

For her part, Juliana couldn’t be more thrilled that the home she grew up in, that haven for thinkers and iconoclasts, is now part of the school that was once carved out of it. “To me, I really think this story is about generations of people who lived in that house who were visionaries, who were curious, who valued learning and education, the exchange of ideas,” reflected Juliana. “And I think that’s a really wonderful legacy for the school, to say that the house had that history.”