The Work
Boca Waterfront
Coral Gables, Florida
The Project
A home shaped by heritage and light
The Coral Gables Residence began not with a mood board, but with a conversation. The family — their roots stretching across Havana and Miami across three generations — asked for something rare: a home that felt inherited rather than assembled. The 1940s Mediterranean Revival structure offered generous arched doorways and ceilings that climbed toward the light, and it was within these bones that the Ceiba House team found their brief. Terracotta drawn from the Cuban countryside, warm brass softened by age, and aged linen that exhaled rather than imposed — every material was chosen to feel as though it had always been there.
The result is a house that resists easy categorization. It is sophisticated without coolness, curated without rigidity. The family's Caribbean heritage surfaces not in explicit ornament but in a certain generosity of space — rooms that invite lingering, corridors that pause, thresholds that ask you to notice them. Natural wood beams were revealed and left honest. Arched niches were given objects with stories. Where others might have added, Ceiba House subtracted, trusting the architecture and the family's collected life to do the speaking.
"We did not want it to feel designed. We wanted it to feel like home — and somehow, impossibly, it feels like both."
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