Among the handful of Palm Beach architects in Addison Mizner’s league was Joseph Urban, an Austrian-born stage designer whose architectural tendencies were, if anything, even more theatrical than Mizner’s. When cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post found her previous mansion, designed by Marion Sims Wyeth, too small for entertaining, she determined to build the grandest house in Palm Beach. After a false start with Wyeth in 1923, she settled on Urban, whose flamboyant designs were more to her liking. Within three years, Urban drove the mansion’s estimated $1 million cost up to nearly $8 million. Aghast at the scale of these expenditures, Post’s husband, stockbroker Edward F. Hutton, finally interceded and cajoled Wyeth into returning to finish the project. Completed in 1927 and christened Mar-a-Lago for its seventeen-acre site stretching from Lake Worth to the Atlantic Ocean, the house was wrapped around a circular patio and contained 115 rooms, including forty-two bedrooms and thirty-one baths. Of Urban’s design, Mizner is said to have remarked, “I think Harry Thaw shot the wrong architect.”