Bal Harbour Condo Design: Inspired by Light

Picture this: You’re designing a 4,000-square-foot waterfront condo in Miami for a Brazilian-based couple who intends to use it as their retirement pad. It’s located in the jaw-dropping Oceana Bal Harbour building, so it can’t be ordinary. What do you do?

There are a million different ways to go, right? But at DKOR Interiors, we were inspired by the couple’s journey of life, and by a similar trip: the one the sun takes around Earth, creating a timeless experience as light travels from one place to another. It may seem a little esoteric, but really, we’re just playing with light: the contrast it creates, the patterns its shadows leave, the rhythm of natural light, and the reflections it casts.

If you sit outside near a tree or bench for long enough, you’ll see how the sun moves and projects different shadows. That’s what we’re doing here, but with design elements and some artificial lighting.

Bal Harbour Condo Design – Our Inspiration

Lighting is one of those tricky elements of interior design, especially for beginners. There are different types of lighting in modern interior design and almost endless rules about where to place light fixtures that it can get overwhelming. But here, we’re throwing out some of the rules and playing with light the way an artist would, to lend texture, depth, and a mood to a space.

Go Inside the Condo Design

We’re not just using actual light (artificial and natural); we’re also taking inspiration from the colors of the sun as it rises and falls and incorporating them into our color and texture palettes.

 

With the main materials in our Bal Harbour condo offering a neutral backdrop (and just a hint of blue to reflect the ocean outside), the lighting elements have plenty of room to shine (pun intended!). To get the picture a bit better, explore two of our proposed room designs that best exemplify how we play with light and execute our design concept:

The Elevator Foyer

Yep, this bad boy has it’s own elevator. And the foyer it opens onto sets the tone for the whole home, so we’re going all in with light. From the moment you step foot into this condo, you know there’s something special going on.

 

First, let’s start with the cage-inspired plass table lamp from Foscarini (a proposed, but not finalized selection), which will cast an eye-catching pattern around the room. Next up is the oversize mirror, which reflects light and immediately brightens up the window-less space. Finally, we’re installing LED lights behind slats on the wall to create shadows that offer rhythm and contrast.

 

 

The Breakfast Nook

In the breakfast nook, floor-to-ceiling windows offer an abundance of natural light, so during our furniture-selection phase, we’ll make sure to choose pieces that will cast shadows and patterns as the sun moves across the sky.

 

 

The étagères that separate the nook from the family room feature unevenly spaced shelves, which will direct intriguing shadows into the space when the sun is shining from that direction. The leggy chairs will have the same effect.

Then there’s the proposed light fixture, purposely similar to the one in the elevator foyer, which will cast a pattern around the room when turned on. Even the glass table and sheers allow light to filter through, changing the way it looks in the process.

These are just two spaces, but each and every room in this Bal Harbour waterfront condo will include elements that incorporate our illusion of light traveling concept. Tying the home together is not only this theme, but also a design aesthetic. We’ve chosen “eclectic modernism” as our look, and lighting is a big part of it. The lighting elements we’ve included are a mix of contemporary, mid-century, and even industrial. The cage-style lamp and the wall installations are two brilliant examples.

Stay tuned as we make progress on this project—everything from picking furniture to the final touches are still to come.

 

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