A triumvirate of home-design experts turns one owner’s wish for a winter escape into a modern marvel on the sun-drenched shores of the South Florida coast. By Anna Kasabian, photographs by IBI Designs.

Three creative masters of architecture, interior design, and landscape have come together to create the take-your-breath-away design elements that form this 2.8-acre tropical utopia stretching across 232 feet of beachfront on Hillsboro Beach, Florida.

Legorreta & Legorreta, an architecture firm known around the world for its exquisite, thought-provoking work, took on the owners’ wish for a peaceful winter getaway and created what looks more like a work of art: a snow-white structure that recalls a modernist sandcastle. It is a place where the heat of the day bounces back to the blue sky, and where the artistry of window placements directs and plays with the sun or moonlight.

For the owners, memories of the unrelenting winter winds and snow-crusted streets of Chicago easily fade to black once they drive down their smooth blue-slate-tiled drive and catch sight of the infinity pool and layered amphitheater of green before them. The only sound here is the gentle lapping of the tide; the only wind a floral-scented breeze.

It was, no doubt, the perfect assignment for Legorreta & Legorreta, who embraced the couple’s desire to create this dreamy escape. Complete with double-height rooms turned at 45 degrees, the home’s layout is a series of living spaces with a design theme that echoes the simplicity of the beach and sky. The visual centerpiece, the sea, anchors nearly all views from all rooms and  keeps the  interior color choices  in check.

As does any precious jewel, this property needed appropriate packaging. The resulting landscape, a fabric of greenery spun around the property that provides a buffer of green and culminates in layers of color and texture, was conceptualized by Spain’s Fernando Caruncho, one of the most creative forces in landscape design.

Each room unfolds fresh perspectives of calm and restrained elegance, and we see the Legorreta & Legorreta design philosophy bobbing to the surface, reminding us that the firm’s quest for “intimacy, peace, and optimism” is met here, wall to wall and window to window. The firm’s signature focus on key ingredients of “color, light, water, and mystery” is perfectly packaged here as well.

Alex Jordan, co-president of the Chicago-based interior design firm of Gregga Jordan Smieszny, who introduced the owners to the firm, says this home was a departure from Legorreta & Legorreta’s usual earth tone palette accented by reds, blues, and purples. It also happens to be the firm’s first East Coast project.

“The owners said they loved [the architecture firm’s] work but they wanted something cool, clean, and crisp to contrast with the vegetation,” says Jordan. “The request for all white was accommodated—just one wall in the family room has a seafoam-painted wall. All floors except one are French limestone, so this home is literally sitting on a platform of limestone. I think we must have emptied a quarry [by the time] this was completed!”

The large slabs of limestone easily recall the undulating beach sands, and the ivory-toned plaster walls maintain a seamless neutrality that holds the 20,000 square feet of space together.

There are seven bedrooms (including a private, sprawling bedroom suite that takes up the entire second floor), seven full and three half baths, three elevators, and a nine-bay subterranean garage, all in addition to the kitchen, dining room, living room, and media or “storm” room. A gridded window wall in the foyer captures serene views, while light off the nearby reflecting pool filters in. It is a dramatic entry that sets the mood for what is to come.

“It’s a large house, but the layout and interior design work in unison to balance intimate spaces with larger, open spaces for entertaining,” Jordan says. The mix of two-story and one-level rooms, including a dramatic two-story galleria leading to four bedroom suites, adjusts the varied moods, as does the placement and shape of windows and the way they bring in the light. “When you look at the house from the outside, it’s almost like a small village because it looks like multiple structures,” Jordan adds.

Except for in that so-called “storm room,” rugs (all from Tibet), fabrics, and furnishings are subdued and neutral, allowing the views to supply color via the time of day, weather, or both—a changing work of art framed in windows. Wherever a splash of color is needed, original art punctuates or climbs a wall. For example, there are a dozen Picasso ceramics, completed by the artist in the South of France in the ’50s and ’60s.

Jordan points out that the storm room is one place where color appears in the fabric, and that using red was an easy choice, as it’s the owners’ favorite color. Here, too, the flooring departs from limestone and is covered instead in Absolute Black granite flooring. He says this is where the owners watch movies and gather when it’s raining, hence the storm room moniker. “With the lower ceilings and color, it’s a more intimate, cozy space,” Jordan says.

The one design constant, however, is the owners’ passion for a 1920s aesthetic. The Swedish-designed leather-covered breakfast room chairs have their roots in the ’20s, as do the twin living room sofas from Paris.

“Even though this room and the dining room, which boasts a 30-foot-high sky-lit ceiling, are formal, we still maintain that quiet cool relaxed notion [of the 1920s],” says Jordan. “We have a traditional layout, and the room is set up to have these two distinct seating areas so that it can accommodate a large gathering … it’s not about filling the spaces of these rooms but [about having] the furnishings be more sculptural.”

Illustrating his point perfectly are the stunning wooden dining room chairs and tables. The chairs seem to have grown upward from the sandy base, forming twin tree groves in the voluminous room. An elegant eight-panel black lacquered 19th-century Chinese screen stands center stage, a beautiful sculptural art piece that also catches the play of natural light from above.

Calm continues to the master bath, where limestone tiles form a seamless floor cover down into the spa tub. A cushy, terrycloth chaise lounge beckons fresh-out-of-the-shower guests. The ornate and unusual 1920s cast-aluminum screen—once a decorative element in a Midwest department store—forms a wall of art studded with shells, turtles, and crabs.

Throughout the residence, curtains are constructed of transparent light wool. They function simply to filter light and offer privacy rather than to make a design statement.

The sleek, clean-lined kitchen is warmed with its limed oak woodwork—a style made popular in France in the 1920s by designer Jean-Michael Frank. “This technique of rubbing an ivory pigment into the oak was very popular then,” Jordan says. The warm woodwork provides a pleasing contrast to the ivory walls and cool black-granite stone-topped counters, he adds. The enormous skylight spine with grillwork functions both as an attractive design element and also works as a screen for the hot summer sun.

A short walk away is a full-service dock, and an escape route for those moments when being grounded on land, no matter how beautiful, confines the soul.