The Sea Spray / 304-312 Ocean Drive

Miami Beach, Florida | unbuilt

The Sea Spray, a mixed-use project at 304-312 Ocean Drive on Miami Beach, interweaves the new and old by combining an historic 1937 apartment building with a new structure on the adjacent vacant lot to form a luxury boutique hotel and restaurant.  

The new building at 312 Ocean houses a restaurant at the street level with hotel suites in the floors above.  The structure reaches around to the existing building at the back to create an intimate courtyard, at the third floor reaching further to serve as an addition of rooms with rooftop terraces. 

The new architecture ties itself into both the existing structure as well as the neighboring buildings by drawing inspiration from their decorative elements, employing similar overall massing, and maintaining a continuous façade plane on the street.  At the same time, the addition employs a new formal language to distinguish itself from the solid concrete and stucco aesthetic of the surrounding postwar buildings by appearing both more sinuous and angled.  A perforated metal railing wraps the new structure and ties it in with the existing structure, ending in the courtyard—where the new and old meet.  The angles of the courtyard between the two buildings contract and expand to both create a private yet expanding interior and to provide irregular surfaces to dissipate the sound created within the space.  

The additions add 11,750 SF of hotel and restaurant space to total 20,400 SF of new and renovated space.   

Awards:

2008 AIA Miami Honor Award

© 2022 Shulman + Associates