Our family has a saying: "Peace perfect peace, with loved ones far away." At the lavish Windsor resort village located in Florida’s Vero Beach — where I spent this past weekend — you can find peace with friends right next door.
How to describe Windsor? Spanning a barrier island between the Indian River and the Atlantic Ocean, it is known as a “village by the sea.” More aptly, it’s a community where Prince Charles would enjoy living — if he could afford it. As it is, he has played on one of the two private polo fields on the grounds.
The excuse for my trip, on the heals of Art Basel Miami Beach, was an art opening at the Gallery at Windsor featuring the screenprints of celebrated Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes, organized in collaboration with London’s Whitechapel Gallery. The show, which runs until February 29, is the first exhibition of the Whitechapel Gallery’s three-year curatorial partnership with the Gallery at Windsor.
The Windsor community, built on 416 acres of a former grapefruit grove, was established in 1989 by retail magnate W. Galen Weston of Toronto, Canada, one of the world’s wealthiest men and owner of London fashion emporium Selfridges and various other stores. His wife is the philanthropist Hilary M. Weston, among Canada's most influential women.
Windsor was designed by Andrès Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk according to the “New Urbanism” concept of residential living, where compact, carefully planned neighborhoods foster a sense of community. As its center, Windsor has a general store, restaurant, cafe, post office, office space, and apartments. A short walk away is a meeting hall, an equestrian center, a beach, tennis, and golf clubs.
There are large estates around the edge of the golf course as well as courtyard homes inside the village and smaller cottages, rowhouses, and apartment villas. The houses are near each other in order to encourage interactions with neighbors, while the garden walls afford private outdoor space. The architecture is Anglo-Caribbean.
Riding in golf carts rather than cars, residents whiz through the landscape on small paths and via a private tunnel located under the highway.
The Gallery at Windsor, a not-for-profit art space that is open to the public, was the perfect setting for Milhazes’s art, since both offer exuberantly colorful flowers, luminous views of nature, and hidden nooks and see-throughs.
At the exhibition opening, Whitechapel Gallery director Iwona Blazwick called Milhazes a conceptual “Carnavalesca” (carnival producer) and observed that her paintings combine two aspects of the artist’s native Rio — the dazzling and the sombre. Milhazes herself then explained that when the sunshine yields to rain in Rio, the city becomes so melancholic that visitors want to flee. Milhazes engaged her audience with such ease that I had to remind myself that she was probably one of the top ten best-selling woman artists in the world.
Dinner was in the enormous courtyard of the stunning Weston guesthouse. My tablemate told me that Windsor’s location two hours north of Miami was a draw: “We can be private and retreat to our courtyard when we want, and we can be social when we want,” she said. Residents, I learned, come largely from the East Coast and Canada.
Windsor is clearly not for everyone, and it’s perhaps no coincidence that the architects’ Florida coastal development site “Seaside” became the artificial setting for the surreal Jim Carrey movie “The Truman Show,” about a man who discovers that the place where he lives is actually a big studio with hidden cameras everywhere, and all his friends are actors.
But for a certain very privileged set, Windsor isn’t just peace. It’s heaven.