MIAMI ARCHITECTURE MODELS

In the 1930s, a strip of hotels and apartment buildings went up along Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue in Miami Beach that would become one of the most distinctive streetscapes in the world. South Beach's Art Deco Historic District — now a protected area of more than 800 buildings — is the largest concentration of Art Deco architecture in existence, a place where the optimism and exuberance of the style survived largely intact because the area fell out of fashion before anyone got around to demolishing it.

Our Miami collection focuses on three of its most characterful hotels. The Century, the Marlin and the Plymouth all date from the late 1930s and share the vocabulary that makes South Beach Art Deco immediately recognisable: the eyebrow shades above the windows, the racing stripes, the pastel render, the nautical curves, the sense that each building is simultaneously practical and theatrical.

Each model is cast in fine plaster and finished by hand in our West Sussex studio, capturing the surface detail and the personality that makes these buildings so immediately enjoyable. They display well together as a set, or individually as a piece of architectural history with an unusually sunny disposition.