Diego Suarez (garden designer)

Diego Suarez
Born	1888 Bogotá, Colombia
Died	14 September 1974 New York City, New York
Nationality	American
Occupation	garden designer

Diego Suarez (1888 in Bogotá, Colombia – 14 September 1974 in New York City, New York) was a garden designer known for his work at James Deering's Villa Vizcaya in Miami, Florida. He also served as a press attaché and minister counselor for Chile in Washington, D.C. from 1948 until 1952 and counselor to the Colombian delegation to the United Nations.

A son of Roberto Suarez, a Colombian diplomat and historian, and his Italian wife, the former Maria Costa (1870–1949), Suarez and his sisters, Camelia and Lucia, and brother, Roberto, spent their childhood in their mother's native country after the death of their father. Suarez took courses as an architectural designer at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence. There the young man was taken up by Arthur Acton of the well-known English expatriate family, who was engaged in restoring the gardens of the Acton villa outside Florence, Villa La Pietra, where the formal terraced plan had been swept away in the early nineteenth century by the fashion for English landscape gardens in the naturalistic manner. Acton passed to Suarez, who went four or five days a week to the villa, some of the formal Renaissance garden ideals that were being revived in the late nineteenth century by designers such as Achille Duchêne.

Through Acton, whose wife was an American heiress, Suarez was introduced into the Anglo-American community of Florence, where he began to lay out gardens, notably, he remembered years later, one at Villa Schifanoia for Lewis Einstein and another for Charles Loeser, one of the first collectors of Paul Cézanne.

In May 1914, when James Deering, the International Harvester heir, and his travelling companion and long-term artistic advisor Paul Chalfin, a decorative painter and interior decorator who once worked for Elsie de Wolfe, were lent one of the smaller casinas at La Pietra, Acton commissioned Suarez to take them around and show them some villas they would not otherwise have had access to. Among the Anglo-Americans in Florence was Lady Sybil Cutting, who had the Villa Medici in Fiesole, and who suggested that Suarez accompany her to America.

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