Size: 5,750 square feet
Type: Condominium Renovation
Location: Sunny Isles, FL
For a first collaboration with architect friends Cecilia and Robert Nichols, from Formwork, we worked on the renovation of an apartment that occupies the entire forty-first floor of a skyscraper located on the east coast of Florida. The apartment features balconies 360-degrees around that allow endless views of beaches, intercostal waters, suburban neighborhoods and the Miami skyline. Metal frame and mesh structures were designed to control guest traffic around the balconies and to house a small collection of epiphytic plants. Exterior furnishings, by B&B Italia and Paola Lenti, create different sitting conditions around the epiphyte structures in an effort to provide spaces for outdoor living and “tame” the harsh environment of profuse wind, salt-spray and heat. The interior spaces adjust to a gradient of golden beach color, on the west, to white surf, on the east, as floor and furnishings take on the different colors that mark the change. The existing east interior partitions were removed to make an uninterrupted room with clear views up and down the coastline. Furnishings fill more of the spaces in the western section, making for an enveloping domestic experience in the guest rooms and family room. Spaces use the colors, textures and patterns from exotic travel destinations. The closets and bunk beds in the guest rooms are decedents of ocean-liner era “steamer trunks”, with polished brass, velvet and suede details.
Woven into the design agenda is the work of three artists who contributed site-specific installations. Aaron Fein's embroidered ”Milky Way" runs the sixty-plus feet of the East Room, providing the only interior wall surface in this substantial space. The piece is subtle throughout the day as the ton-sur-ton white stitching, occasionally interrupted by soft pastel colors, shifts quietly with the light. Along the hallway outside the west-side guest rooms artist Leah Patgorski's piece "Dhobi Ghat" or "Clothes Lines" adorns the full length of the hall, with movable silk and linen panels that become an enormous light fixture. Cristina Hernandez Villalon's "Ceramic Gradients 01" is located at the elevator entry hall. The piece is made up of over four hundred pieces of ceramic, one hundred and twenty of them made by Hernandez Villalon, curated to follow the gradient from the dark blues of the deep ocean, to the lighter teals and greens, to the white of the waves crashing on shore and on to the sand tones of the beach.
Design Consulting: Mauricio Del Valle Design
Architecture: Formwork
Lighting Design: G2J
Construction: Brickell Group
Landscape Installation: Superior Landscaping
Photography: Michael Stavaridis