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The Estates at Acqualina

A newly delivered oceanfront residence, taken from developer handover through a full interior transformation — beginning with the acceptance inspection that protected the purchase before a single change was made.

Location: Sunny Isles Beach, FL
Building: The Estates at Acqualina
Engagement: Acceptance, then design & furnishing
Direction: Classical, commissioned millwork

Principal bedroom with emerald Murano chandelier, ornamental plasterwork and mirrored joinery — Principal bedroom — commissioned joinery, ornamental plaster and a Murano chandelier selected to set the room's temperature.

The keys came first. The work came second.

When my clients purchased this residence, it was newly completed and, on paper, finished. Before any design work began, I carried out a room-by-room acceptance inspection — marble flooring, paint quality, mechanical systems, cabinetry, hardware, glazing and finish details, each issue photographed, categorised and taken back to the developer.

Only once those corrections were closed out did we begin the part most people think of as the project: the interior itself. The order matters. Every hour spent designing on top of unresolved construction defects is an hour that has to be undone later, at the owner's cost.

The brief for the arrival floor was borrowed from the Paris Opera: the deep velvet red of a theatre box, carried across every surface. Getting there was mostly a question of what the building would allow. Heavy velvet drapery was planned for the elevator wall and refused by the fire marshal — a constraint far cheaper to discover before fabrication than after. The doors were finished in limewash instead, which reads as depth rather than as paint and leaves the assembly itself untouched.

Scope note. The kitchen was delivered by the developer and is not shown here. On the terrace, my role was furniture and styling only. Everything else on this page — joinery, finishes, lighting, textiles and sourcing — was commissioned and coordinated as part of the engagement.

Elevator landing finished in deep red, with antique secretaire and velvet ottoman — Arrival, not circulation. Panelling, mouldings and doors carried in one tone around an antique secretaire — the landing treated as a room rather than as the space before one.

Elevator doors finished in limewash against polished plaster on the private landing — The same landing, facing the elevators. Limewash on the doors against polished plaster — depth without touching an assembly the building will not let you alter.

A room built around one painting.

The main room started from a single work of art — an original Botero. Palette, textures and the shape of the furniture were all chosen to sit with it rather than compete — a different exercise from finishing a room and then deciding what to hang. The brief was a music room, so the piano set the plan and everything else was arranged to leave it room to be heard.

The cabinetry was commissioned to hold a working library at full height, with glazed doors and integrated lighting. Its exterior hardware is by Salice Paolo, an Italian brass house in Cantù making handles by hand since 1937, specified piece by piece. On joinery of this scale the hardware is the part anyone actually touches, and it is usually the first thing value-engineered out.

Living room with commissioned cream cabinetry, blue velvet sofa, grand piano and framed artwork — The music room. Cabinetry sized to the library it holds, not to a catalogue — and a palette taken from the Botero it was built around.

Detail of commissioned cabinetry with glazed doors, silvered hardware and integrated shelf lighting — Salice Paolo hardware and glazing bars, specified individually. At this level the difference between good and ordinary sits in the details nobody photographs.

Detail of silk drapery with bullion tassel tieback and beaded trim — Trim, tieback and lining chosen together — the part of a scheme that dates fastest when it is chosen last.

Detail of an ornate silver door knob and backplate on a panelled door — Door hardware specified to match the cabinetry it sits beside — the same house, the same hand, carried from furniture into fittings.

A dressing room, not a storage room.

The brief treated this as its own space rather than as an afterthought behind the bedroom — classic joinery, a chandelier, mirrored doors and open shelving, finished with the same custom drapery used through the rest of the residence. The curtains do the real work: they turn a closet into a room the residence is happy to open onto, instead of one it hides.

Dressing room with crystal chandelier, mirrored wardrobe doors and custom drapery — Open shelving, mirror and light treated as finishes in their own right, not as afterthoughts inside a closet.

Detail of gilt bronze pulls on mirrored wardrobe doors — The same hardware discipline carried from the cabinetry into the closet doors.

Emerald Murano glass chandelier below a carved plaster ceiling rose in the primary bedroom — The primary bedroom's chandelier — Murano glass, sourced to a specific colour rather than to a category.

Detail of layered ornamental cornice and ceiling mouldings in pale grey and cream — The crown profile does double duty — it dresses the ceiling and disguises the building's own contemporary soffits and AC grilles, which don't belong to a room built like this one.

One window, two rooms, one problem.

The primary suite's main challenge was architectural: a single run of glass connects the bedroom to the bathroom, floor to ceiling. The owners' request was simple to say and harder to deliver — a genuinely seamless blackout, with no light leak at the edges where a bedroom this size usually loses the fight.

The solution was heavy drapery in a double blackout layer, engineered to the window rather than bought to a standard width. It is the kind of fix that photographs as "just curtains" and is, in practice, the reason the room actually works at night.

Glass wall connecting the primary bathroom to the bedroom beyond — The run of glass in question — bathroom to bedroom, with no wall to hide behind.

The children's room.

The same classical vocabulary carried through in a lighter register — rose in place of red, but the same discipline in hardware, mouldings and light. The rooms a visitor never sees were not treated as an afterthought.

Children's bedroom with twin beds, crystal chandelier and rose-pink drapery — Twin beds, a dress form left mid-fitting, and the same crown mouldings used throughout the residence.

Crystal chandelier in the children's bedroom, seen from below — A smaller chandelier, scaled to the room rather than simplified for it.

Wall sconce with a sculpted ribbon motif in polished nickel — A ribbon motif on the sconce — the one deliberately playful note in the room.

Detail of a heavy silk tieback with crystal finial and beaded trim in the children's bedroom — The same tieback hardware as the rest of the residence, sized down but not simplified.

Oceanfront terrace with woven outdoor sofa overlooking the Atlantic — The terrace — furniture and styling only. The reason the building exists, and the one room that needed nothing added but comfort.

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