House in Miami Beach
Single-family residential project. Miami Beach, FL. Work with Oppenheim. Landscape by Enea Landscape Architecture.
A House for friends
The house is built on a single, generous move: lift the bedrooms into a solid volume above, and let everything below be light and flow. This gesture alone does most of the work. Freed from the weight above it, the ground floor opens on three sides, glass sliding away until living and dining are barely rooms at all and turn into a covered clearing between the pool and the gardens around it.
The two levels don't try to resemble each other. Above the mass of the concrete holding the bedrooms like a solid resting lightly overhead. Below, almost nothing: thin columns, sheer curtains, and a wall that divides living areas from service spaces, just enough structure to hold the roof. The heaviness of one is what makes the lightness of the other legible.
The house itself is compact, but the compactness barely registers. With three sides given over to glass at the ground floor, it borrows the space around it: the garden becomes part of the living room, the pool an extension of the deck, and the bay a wall the house never quite builds. At night, the effect reverses. The ground floor lights up entirely, a lantern of glass and thin steel, while the bedrooms above sit dark and quiet.
