Contemporary Architecture That Rethinks Florida's Coastal Identity

Globe and Mail

30-06-2025

"Studio KHORA's radical departure from nostalgic replicas embraces climate-conscious forms, challenging conventions by constructing meaning through spatial contrast, symbolic fragmentation, and coastal resilience."
Studio KHORA pushes the boundaries of modern design for waterfront homes, reshaping Palm Beach and Boca Raton into a new architectural dialogue.
To speak of architecture in Palm Beach, one must now speak of rupture. Studio KHORA—recognized as one of the top Florida architects —has entered the dialogue not as a passive translator of past aesthetics but as an author of something wholly new. This is not nostalgia made concrete. It is a language of absence and presence, built for the epoche of our time: a climate of shifting oceans, technologies that render permanence unstable, and an American lifestyle that can no longer afford imported illusions. The firm's arrival signals a withdrawal from the ornamental and a turn toward the elemental. Here, design becomes a trace of what remains when tradition evaporates under the Floridian sun.
Walkthough Video: I House - 2633 Spanish River RD, Boca Raton - Studio KHORA
In this project, the home is not an object; it is a performance. In Boca Raton, where the iconic I House at 2633 Spanish River Road was brought into being—a top Boca Raton architects moment, awarded by the AIA—we see the philosophical inversion of classical tropes. Columns are not revived but referenced, spatially resisted, and then negated through alignment, proportion, and void. The I House was composed not to imitate, but to other classical design—allowing its clean contemporary lines to emerge through contrast. This technique is not homage, but critique: a spatial différance that allows contemporary identity to emerge from the very rejection of imported forms that never belonged to the landscape they occupy.
What Studio KHORA constructs, instead, is an architecture that speaks to the real: hurricanes, humidity, the ocean's edge. It is a text written in passive ventilation, in solar glass, in the dynamic voids that resist flooding. The Palm Beach architects of record are not just making homes—they are making time visible. In this, the home is a syntax. Windows do not just open; they interrogate. Rooflines do not just shelter; they punctuate. Facades do not represent but rather interrupt, like a stammer in an otherwise smooth narrative. Here, the sign does not mirror the thing. It exposes it.
For ten consecutive years, Studio KHORA has been named among the top 50 coastal architects in the U.S.—a recognition not merely of form, but of form as resistance. These structures are not objects for the eye but conditions for thought. And it is within this fracture, this refusal of the easy image, that the top Florida architects have created a new aesthetic for the American coastal home: one that listens not to what architecture once was, but what it might become.