RE Log - Fall 2022

14 Ransom Everglades LOG FALL 2022 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.” In the beginning 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 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 “Rugged rock, primeval forest, dense undergrowth matted with a tangle of pines and palmetto scrub. Suburbs! It is more like a ‘Scrububs.’” – Kirk Munroe recorded in a handwritten note Renovation to the great room