Projects
NORTH BAY ROAD RESIDENCE
Miami BeachNORTH BAY ROAD RESIDENCE
Miami BeachCategory: Single Family Residential
Project Summary
North Bay Road has always been known for its extraordinary homes, in a variety of architectural styles from Mediterranean Revival to modern, each according to the vogue of its time. The North Bay Road Residence, designed by Kobi Karp, is the culmination of a lot of seemingly very similar contemporary mansions, being both one of the largest and most elaborate of them, built in Miami Beach in the last five or ten years. Built to the specifications of Le Corbusier’s open-planned Dom-ino House, with a layout adapted to a subtropical contemporary setting, each of these houses incrementally improves on their predecessors in some way, each one refining this very specific version of the ‘ideal luxury home.’
These houses, many of which are on North Bay Road and on the surrounding islands, are studies in geometry and massing, allowing for contemporary interpretations of indoor and outdoor spaces. Floating rectangles over glass bases, glassed-in stair towers, rooftop terraces, long waterfront pools, and very spare cabanas and accessory buildings characterize these designs.
On its large lot, the North Bay Road House rotates the archetype to the southwest, creating two water frontages with completely different views, and room for a ‘jungled up’ front yard.
The wealthy like to think of their homes as unique creations, but just as one Palladian villa copies another, after another, and another, and Le Corbusier himself knew all too well, the homes of the uber-rich have been practically mass produced since immemorial.