The White CubeDowntown Miami, Florida

The commission: The White Cube in Downtown Miami, Florida

Seven bedrooms in 11,100 sq ft of built-up area, in Downtown Miami, Florida. The bedrooms lead the programme, and the rooms around them are a formal living room and a dining hall for receiving guests, a home gym and a private cinema for the household, and the rooms that serve them: a rooftop pantry, a guard room, a powder room, staff accommodation and a laundry. Architecture and interiors were one scope, so the white volumes outside and the beige and walnut rooms inside come from the same set of drawings: white render without, beige and walnut within.

The house is one of seven commissions in the United States on the studio's project schedule, drawn by LKYOOB from its studio in Dubai and shown here as a design visualisation of the house from the street corner.

What the site sets

Lawn lies on both sides of the house as it is drawn. From the front, in daylight, the white volumes step back as they rise, so the front is a stack of terraces framed in dark metal above a lawn; to the rear, the garden elevation is full-height glazing to a second lawn. The site has a front and a back, and the house treats them differently: the front is given its terraces and the garden is given its glass, so the terraces look one way and the glazed elevation opens the other.

A garden elevation of full-height glazing needs shading or overhangs on the faces that take the afternoon sun, and the terraces are where the floors above step outside, because outdoor rooms and terraces extend the living space where the climate allows it. The programme sets the rest. Seven bedrooms inside 11,100 sq ft is a house on more than one level, and the visualisations show its levels as stacked volumes, each stepped back from the one below so that the top of one volume is the terrace of the next, and the rooms behind the terraces have outdoor space on their own level.

How the house answers it

The house is a set of white rendered volumes that step back as they rise, and each step back leaves a terrace, framed in dark metal, in front of the rooms above it. The stacking gives the house its depth from the front: each floor is set further back than the one below, so the elevation is read in steps rather than as one plane. In daylight the composition reads as stacked terraces and dark-framed glazing over a lawn, the glazing and the terraces both edged in dark frames, so the white is drawn with dark lines through it. To the rear the house gives the garden a full-height glazed elevation over its lawn, and the rooms on that side take the garden as their view.

Inside, the interiors are warm where the outside is white, which is where a scope of architecture and interiors shows. A family living room and an open kitchen are drawn in beige and walnut, the kitchen with an island and walnut joinery, and a family dining room sits with them; the formal living room of the programme is drawn as a room of its own, and a family retreat with dark upholstery closes the set. The master bedroom is finished with a padded headboard wall and its bathroom with a freestanding bath. Beige and walnut run through the family living room and the kitchen, so a house of seven bedrooms and this many rooms reads as one interior rather than as a sequence of finishes.

Where the project stands

The White Cube is a design study, shown as visualisations rendered from the studio's drawings; none of the images is a photograph of a built house. The schedule records it in Downtown Miami, Florida, with the area and programme stated above. The other United States studies on this site, Villa Motion in Miami, Ground House in Florida and Villa Vista at Lake Travis, Austin, Texas, are linked below.