White modern residence around a shaded pool courtyard in afternoon light
Coconut Grove, FL · Completed

Oolite House

A limestone mass wall holds the afternoon; the rooms hold the breeze.

year
2024
area
6,400 SF
program
Private residence
recognition
AIA Miami Honor Award, 2024
01Concept
The brief

A family of five asked for a house that could stay open in July. Not conditioned into sealed rooms: genuinely open, doors back, the Grove's canopy moving through it.

The site

A deep lot under mature banyans two blocks off the bay, with the long axis running east to west and the afternoon sun arriving exactly where the living spaces wanted to be.

The climate move

An H-plan wraps a shaded courtyard; the west wall is a two-foot-thick oolitic limestone mass that takes the afternoon sun so the living rooms never have to.

02Blueprint
Plan study
Section: shaded strata
Detail: the meridian datum
Materials, as drawn

Oolitic limestone · Ipe · Impact-rated pocket glazing · White stucco

Timber and white volumes under a mature tree
03Manifest
The response, built

The plan splits into two bars joined by a breezeway: bedrooms north, living south, and between them a courtyard the section shades by ten in the morning. The west end is closed by the mass wall that names the house, quarried oolite laid in running courses, holding the heat until after the family has moved to the water side.

The detail that proves it

Pocket glazing spans the full south bay; when it opens, the courtyard, breezeway, and living bar become one room with a five-knot breeze in it. The louver screens are aluminum, sized to the sun angle of late May.

Set to solar time.