At this contemporary Miami home, we will not inform the place the backyard ends and the structure begins — and that is exactly the purpose

For years, Theodore Stohner had dreamed of constructing a house of his personal. ‘I grew up not removed from Fallingwater, which, as a baby, was a formative architectural expertise,’ he recollects.

Later, whereas working for an funding administration firm in London close to the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Bartlett College of Structure, he would slip away at lunchtime to browse the bookshops and daydream a couple of future home. ‘I would executed numerous fascinated about what I needed lengthy earlier than there was an precise challenge,’ he says.

The chance got here years later, after Theodore and his future spouse, Belinda—knowledgeable pianist and violinist—settled collectively in Miami. Within the metropolis’s historic Morningside neighbourhood, he found a uncommon parcel: an undeveloped, jungle-like double lot the place the proprietor had planted an newbie botanical backyard. As a result of the town prices a steep charge for each tree eliminated, the location resisted typical improvement and the Stohners have been in a position to buy it properly under the checklist worth.

Whereas dwelling in London, Theodore had come throughout a Miami home by Brillhart Structure, designed for the agency’s founder and principal, Jacob and Melissa Brillhart. Impressed by Florida’s Cracker homes and the Tropical Modernism of Paul Rudolph and others, its quiet rigour and sensitivity to the local weather instantly struck a chord with him. ‘Brillhart was the one alternative,’ he says of the native apply. ‘Fortunately, they favored the challenge.’ The partnership was set in movement.

At first, Theodore imagined a single steel-and-glass construction on the centre of the location. However realizing that such a scheme would require eradicating dozens of bushes, he and the architects shifted course. ‘We needed to be immersed in the fantastic thing about the land,’ says Theodore, ‘which, regardless of being in the midst of Miami, incorporates over 200 mature bushes, 600 saplings and too many crops to depend.’

From the outset, the architects approached the one-third-acre property like an archaeological website. ‘We mapped the mature bushes first,’ says Jacob. ‘Then we requested: how can we weave the structure by way of these areas?’

The 4,100-square-foot home developed as 4 pavilions—two one-storey, two two-storey—linked by glass passages and open-air walkways and threaded by way of the forest of strangler fig, Southern stay oak and gumbo-limbo bushes, with understory plantings of and bay cedar, Bahama espresso and seashore creeper, amongst many others.