The Mediterranean Revival style, which came to national prominence in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, was derived from many sources including colonial Spanish missions in California as well as architecture from Renaissance-era Spain, most notably buildings constructed in the fanciful style known as Churrigueresque during the seventeenth century (Spain, 14). The style flourished as Florida’s communities imaginatively promoted themselves as fantasy lands, but also with a view to creating "antiquity" in hopes of competing with that offered by European travel destinations. In St. Petersburg, Spanish-influenced architecture designed between 1914 and 1932 would have a tremendous impact on the physical fabric of the city in both residential subdivisions like Snell Isle, Granada Terrace and Pasadena, as well as on individual landmarks.

The style is considered the product of varied architectural motifs along the Mediterranean coast, expressing Italian style and Moorish themes from southern Spain as well as North Africa. Features of the Mediterranean Revival style include multi-story buildings with asymmetrical massing, stuccoed wall surfaces and low-pitched, red tile roofs. Arches are used to mark doors and major windows. Doors are typically wood and may be ornamented further by inset tiles, carved stone, columns or pilasters on their surrounds. Often the building will have a focal window, sometimes tripartite in arrangement and occasionally fitted with stained glass. Balconies and window grilles are common and are typically made from wrought iron or wood. Ornamentation can range from simple to dramatic and may draw from a number of Mediterranean references.

Although Florida had been under the Spanish crown for over two-hundred and fifty years, the architectural effects of that influence were generally restricted to St. Augustine and Pensacola and not disseminated throughout the state or through the building patterns of later eras. Whereas "in other parts of the country, the Spanish style was an evolutionary style that grew out of continuous building traditions from the years of Spanish settlement," Florida’s Mediterranean Revival style was imagined, imparting a sense antiquity and stability on a region which "itself was an invention, a tropical wonderland built on swamp and muck" (Dunlop, 191). Furthermore, designers in this tourist state may have been attempting to lure wealthy and middling tourists alike by recreating the architectural allure of the Italian and French Rivieras on the Mediterranean. In any event, the style that would put such an imprint on St. Petersburg and the state in the 1920s emerged from influences dating only after the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago with architect A. Page Brown’s Spanish mission-style design for the California State Pavilion. The Mediterranean Revival style was brought into greater relief in 1915 with Bertram Goodhue’s California Building at the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego which clearly established the Spanish Colonial Revival style and put more emphasis on applied decoration than what was found typically in the mission style (Spain, 30).

Mediterranean Revival first emerged in Florida through the work of Richard Kiehnel on El Jardin in Miami in 1917. Designing the mansion for a Pittsburgh steel tycoon, Kiehnel departed from the Mission style that had only recently made its appearance in Florida in Homestead’s 1914 Public School and created antiquity in the house using techniques to get the desired effect. Kiehnel would elevate Pinellas County’s association with Mediterranean Revival through his designs of the Rolyat Hotel in Gulfport (now Stetson College of Law) and the Snell Arcade in St. Petersburg.

St. Petersburg also had early Mission-style architectural antecedents that allowed it to move seamlessly into the Mediterranean Revival style while imparting a sense of continuity with the Spanish influence. Examples of Mission architecture which rival the earliest versions of the style in Florida include La Plaza Theater, the Atlantic Coast Line passenger depot, and the St. Petersburg Yacht Club – all built between 1914 and 1915 and later demolished – which aptly reflected the style. Existing examples built later include the St. Petersburg High School at Mirror Lake (1919), the Flori-de-Leon (1924), and the Ponce de Leon Hotel (1922).

Mediterranean Revival thrived for a decade after Kiehnel’s inaugural effort and today characterizes some of Florida’s most significant buildings, interesting communities, and the work of its most notable architects. One such noteworthy was Addison Mizner who perhaps singlehandedly brought the style to prominence in Palm Beach and Boca Raton during the late 1910s and 1920s. Mizner designed the Everglades Club in 1918 for Paris Singer, which was the "first public offering" of the Mediterranean style in Florida (Hatton, 77). He transformed Palm Beach from a city that could have "passed for a New Jersey seaside resort" with its clapboard and gabled buildings to one that by 1928 had taken on the air of a Spanish town (Curl, xii). Later architects noteworthy in their own right such as Maurice Fatio and Joseph Urban would be expected by clients to design Mediterranean villas. Urban’s architectural tour de force in Palm Beach -- Mar-a-Lago -- which he designed for Marjorie Merriweather Post, resembles a small Spanish village, "revealing traits that are essentially Gothic, (with) Spanish towers topped by chimneys that might have been from the Netherlands..." (Curl, 1992, 440).

Further south, George Merrick was building Coral Gables in the Mediterranean style. The city, named after the distinctive materials used by his father in designing their nearby family home, was almost wholly built in the Mediterranean Revival style, a design thrust underscored by romantic Spanish street names assigned to the road network. Merrick’s vision was different from Mizner’s in that he was intent on building a community where people of broad and diverse means would raise crops, produce both necessities and trinkets, and be educated (Dunlop, 204). North of Coral Gables in Miami Shores, Kiehnel continued his influence on the style through a mixture of Mediterranean and Pueblo Revival designs for this 1920s subdivision, while just west of Miami Glenn Curtiss, the noted aviator, developed Opa Locka, an imaginative city built with a fanciful Moorish influence.

On the Gulf Coast, Sarasota was conjuring its own myth as a glamourous but stable by invoking the Mediterranean Revival style in civic, commercial and residential buildings (McDonough, 11). The conception of Sarasota as a Mediterranean city was a "fantasy" designed to promote real estate sales; since only portions of the city were actually built in the style prior to the 1926 real estate bust, promoters used advertisements embellished with the style to substitute image for lack of substance (McDonough 13). Significant individual examples of the style do exist, however, in the Burns Court subdivision, Sarasota County Courthouse, City Waterworks, and Ca’d’ Zan’ -- the residence of John Ringling designed by Dwight James Baum. The City of Venice, fifteen miles south of Sarasota is notable for its concentration of Mediterranean Revival residential and commercial buildings, a pattern continued in contemporary design.