MIAMI, FLORIDA
The Horizontal bathroom is part of the master suite of a unit on the 53rd floor of the Four Seasons Tower and the second portion of the Vertical Bathroom study. The height affords unobstructed views from all the unit’s floor to ceiling windows, including the bath. ODP uses the same detail oriented architectural language to parallel the concepts studied in the Vertical Bathroom. Using this language a connection between the occupant and the open landscape outside is reinterpreted by rotating the major stone wall into a horizontal plane. The owner wished to carry the feeling of openness created by these large expanses of glass into the floor plan. The horizontal stone plane became the visual anchor towards the exterior, as part of the sinks, surrounding the tub and out to limitless abyss. The challenge was to create a functioning master bathroom that allowed the views to be seen from all of a bathroom’s functional elements.
Breaking with traditional bathroom design, in which all the functional elements are placed against the walls of the room, the design team chose to reorient the room so the view was prominently displayed from each functional area. The sinks face the view, with only the slim mirrors that are structurally adhered to the clear glass plane separating them from the tub space and the view beyond. During the design phase the architects built a full scale mock-up of the tub entry step elements in order to test various height relationships between the top step and the bottom of the tub.
One of the biggest challenges of the project was to create the large seemingly seamless 4 inch thick centerpiece of stone from 3 separate slabs. Each slab was hand selected from various matching lots in order to book match the tops, with the joint being hidden beneath the glass wall, just like that of the Vertical Bathroom.