This Historic Palm Beach Home Is the Perfect Backdrop for a Major Collector’s Dynamic Mix of Art and Design Masterpieces
A four-year restoration and addition to a landmark Marion Sims Wyeth estate gives philanthropist Jennifer Gilbert a worthy setting for her ever-expanding collection
When Jennifer Gilbert first stepped into the living room of a 1922 oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, designed by Marion Sims Wyeth, a premier architect of the area’s Gilded Age glamour, she knew it was for her. “This was untouched,” says the Detroit-based philanthropist, art collector, and entrepreneur. The dramatic light-flooded space has a wood-timbered cathedral ceiling, a circular stairway in an enclosed tower with an interior Juliet balcony, and repeating arched glass-paned double doorways across each length—one side opening to the tropically planted interior courtyard, the other out to the Atlantic.
Never mind that the rest of the house had undergone a series of poor renovations and architectural interventions during the course of the century. Gilbert, who studied interior design at Michigan State University and founded the commercial design business Pophouse in Detroit over a decade ago, was up for the job. “This was a dream project for me,” she says.
She bought the home in 2020 and worked with local firm Kirchhoff & Associates Architects and landscape designers Nievera Williams over the next four years to peel the structure back to its illustrious roots. They were careful to retain original features, such as the neo-Mediterranean barrel-vaulted arcades and the configuration of rooms encircling the courtyard, while adding a second floor and a historically appropriate addition to one side of the house, flanking a reoriented pool area.
Gilbert personally curated every room, mixing distinctive one-offs and vintage finds—like a pair of 1950s Italian side tables in the living room she had recently bought at a Paris flea market—with vibrant works of modern and contemporary art culled from her vast collection of over 500 pieces. “I wanted the architecture and the design details to be of the period but less serious and more unexpected in my furnishings,” she says.
For Gilbert, who in the past three years has faced the loss of the eldest of her five children from the rare genetic disease neurofibromatosis type 1 and the end of a long marriage to Dan Gilbert (cofounder of Rocket Mortgage), the Palm Beach home “is definitely a new chapter,” she says. “It feels a little lighter and less encumbered than Detroit. It’s mine.”
She has used the home extensively over the past two winter seasons for personal downtime, family vacations, and girls’ trips while maintaining her primary residence in the Detroit area, where she was born and raised. There, Gilbert has served for 12 years on the board of the Cranbrook Academy of Art and its art museum—the influential interdisciplinary institution in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, that has seeded generations of artists and designers.
She began collecting seriously in 2013 with her first purchases at auction of works by Kenneth Noland, Joan Mitchell, and Ruth Asawa—just as the latter’s suspended looped-wire sculptures were starting to be rediscovered. Gilbert credits Cranbrook as an important influence on her collecting and these days makes frequent studio visits with students there, including the Gilbert Fellows, recipients of a full-scholarship program she launched in 2021 and has funded in perpetuity. “I love fine art as well as craft and feel the lines can be blurred,” she says. “What really resonates with me is color and surface, how those translate to texture and form.”
Setting a playful tone at the entrance of the home is a small painting by John Currin of a woman’s head thrown back in laughter. Nearby, Mitchell’s Abstract Expressionist painting in a ravishing sunflower palette hangs adjacent to a Tschabalala Self canvas with a brown odalisque figure amid stylized foliage. In the living room, two mid-20th-century canvases by avant-gardists Lucio Fontana and Enrico Baj are in conversation with a 2004 abstraction by Cecily Brown.
Many artists on view in her home have Detroit connections—from Ed Clark, who lived his final years in the city, to former Cranbrook artists-in-residence Beverly Fishman and Anders Ruhwald, as well as intergenerational alumni of the school, including Olga de Amaral, McArthur Binion, Chris Schanck, and Zoe McGuire. Their works are interspersed with those by Willem de Kooning, Shara Hughes, Henry Taylor, Lynne Drexler, Kevin Beasley, Alice Neel, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, among dozens of others.
Last fall, for the first time, Gilbert publicly debuted a broad selection from her collection in “Seen/Scene: Artwork from the Jennifer Gilbert Collection” at The Shepherd in Detroit. It provided an opportunity for local artists to be shown next to historic works, with pieces by Akea Brionne and Tiff Massey hung alongside 20th-century canvases by Helen Frankenthaler and Barkley L. Hendricks. Nearby, at Stanton Yards, a former marina, Gilbert is building a new multipurpose nonprofit art space called Lumana, where she plans to rotate portions of her collection and collaborate with artists, designers, and cultural institutions. She has invited Cranbrook to participate in the inaugural exhibition, expected to open in 2029. “My passion has grown not just to collect historic works and own pieces by working artists but to really be helpful in their practice and hopefully in their lives,” Gilbert says.
She loves to live with these beautiful things but doesn’t want her Palm Beach home to feel precious. “I don’t take myself, or life, too seriously,” she adds. “Hopefully, the house reflects my personality.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Late Fall Issue under the headline “Sea Change” Subscribe to the magazine.