Tomorrow, redesigned plans for Lennar CEO Stuart Miller's mega estate at 22 Star Island Drive will go before the Miami Beach Design Review Board, where they'll see that Miller does in fact intend to preserve most (but not all) of the historic house now on the site. They just won't have much luck finding it in the project's renderings, which are part of the package that Stuart's architects submitted to the board. Nor would they if ever invited to the finished product for that matter.
According to Stuart's plans, the house's porte cochere, one of its architectural highlights, will be demolished, while the rest of the structure is moved to the opposite side of the lot and flipped almost 180 degrees. It will be moved back from the water and it will face an almost entirely windowless two-story wall, making it mostly invisible to anybody inside the new house.
The house, designed by DOMO Architecture + Design, will have a central courtyard, three staircases, three pools, a ten car underground garage, two pool houses (the plans call them 'cabanas'), two servants rooms, a master suite with just endless square footages and a sort of bathroom-within-a-bathroom called a wet room, and two kitchens. One faces the family room and the other, larger, kitchen is right behind it. One of the pools is suspended on a second floor balcony just off the master suite. Oh, and those three stairs don't include the one in the historic house. Together, the two houses will have about 27,000 square feet of interior space.
· 22 Star Island Drive coverage [Curbed Miami]