West Palm Beach's most expensive new home comes with its own curator. Led by founder Dmitry Prut, Avant Gallery has selected large-scale paintings, sculpture and collectible design from its global roster of artists for the $43 million modern residence on South Flagler Drive, integrating the works throughout a home that arrived with an award already attached.
The house runs 13,370 square feet on the water. Its defining piece is a cantilevered glass pool that hangs off the second story over 144 feet of private Intracoastal frontage.
Inside, furnishings from the Italian design house Poltrona Frau set the baseline for the rooms, and Avant's works go in on top of that foundation. The gallery says the paintings and sculpture respond to the scale and architecture of the home while adding contrast, personality and what it calls moments of surprise. Art, furniture and architecture were considered in relation to one another, which is the gallery's case for describing the interiors as having the character of a collection rather than a conventionally decorated home.
For Avant, the commission is a different kind of job. The gallery is taking the curatorial approach it has built in its own spaces and applying it to a private residence, a move it frames as an evolution of its practice into luxury real estate. In its telling, art here is not the final decorative layer applied once the rooms are done. It is part of how the house establishes its identity, and the pieces were chosen to shape how the architecture is experienced rather than to fill expansive walls.
The gallery ties the timing to the market. South Florida's luxury residential market has become increasingly design-conscious, with architecture, art and lifestyle doing more of the work of distinguishing properties at the highest end.
As Avant moves its curatorial perspective into residential settings, the lines between collecting, interiors and real estate start to blur. On South Flagler Drive, that leaves a $43 million house with a cultural identity of its own.