Photos: Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Through the Years, Inside and Out

Front view of Mar-a-Lago, January, 31, 2017 in Palm Beach. Post cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post was Mrs. Edward F. Hutton when she commissioned Marion Sims Wyeth to build her a 58-bedroom Spanish-Moorish-Portuguese-Venetian palace on 17 acres of jungle between the ocean and the Intracoastal. By the time it was finished in 1927, Joseph Urban, a Viennese architect and theater designer, had provided much of the ornamentation. Six hundred workers labored for more than three years to build Mar-a-Lago, using boatloads of Italian stone and approximately 36,000 antique Spanish and Portuguese tiles, as well as old marble floors and roof tiles from Cuba. The estate's 75-foot tower is a South Florida landmark - and a navigational aid to boaters. When she died in 1973, Post gave Mar-a-Lago ("ocean to lake" in Spanish) to the U.S. government for a presidential retreat, but the government balked at its million-dollar-a-year maintenance cost and its site under the Palm Beach International Airport's flight path. In 1985, Donald Trump paid $10 million for the estate, which contained 33 bathrooms, three bomb shelters and a nine-hole golf course. Ten years later, he converted it to a private club with a spa, tennis and croquet courts, a new ballroom and beach club.