Acclaimed Miami-based architect Rene Gonzalez's Prairie Residence, completed in 2017 on a landlocked residential street in the heart of Miami Beach just off sunny and somewhat hostile Dade Boulevard, is one of his most extraordinary designs to date and a really masterful yet particularly unusual home. The 3,312-square-foot contemporary luxury residence was designed for its environment and its future environment, impacted by forces such as sea-level rise. Priced at a precise $15,151,000 apparently, the house has been on the market since last November, and, well, it's still here.
This ranch-style house, built in 1949, was extensively restored and renovated by Rene Gonzalez, one of Miami's most acclaimed architects, first as his personal home and then his architecture office. The house has spectacular details, like the ceiling lights above the entryway, and restored original walnut cabinets rescued from the legendary Palm Bay Club.
Miami is a city of interesting architecture and interior design. Those million dollar condos in buildings designed by some of the most famous and interesting international architects in the business (here’s looking at you One Thousand Museum, Park Grove, and Jade Signature) are magnificent blank canvases. Here are five local interior design firms working to make our city more beautiful and unique, inside and out.
Three or four years ago Bruce Berkowitz, the head of Miami-based Fairholme Capital, an investment fund, undertook the creation of a new contemporary art space much like many of Miami's other privately-owned art museums. The art within would be particularly spectacular though. Located on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami's Edgewater neighborhood, it would house two particularly important, incredible, and gigantic works of art: James Turrell’s Aten Reign and Richard Serra’s Passage of Time, along with many other works in his collection.
Rene Gonzalez, a masterful architect based in Miami, recently published his first monograph, Not Lost in Translation. The book covers fourteen of his most significant completed projects. Two inserts explore some of Rene's inspirations from Miami, with old photographs taken by the architect alongside essays by that great chronicler of architecture in Miami, Beth Dunlop. One is about Stiltsville, the community on stilts in the middle of Biscayne Bay, and the other explores Little Havana.
A few years ago. architect Rene Gonzalez designed the interiors and build-out of Unit 3701 at Icon South Beach for Ion Varouxakis, a Greek shipping magnate (yes, yes, that's a very Greek thing to be) who wanted an apartment modeled after his historic sailing yacht.
