The story of Fort Lauderdale architects has long been written in stucco and terracotta, a cityscape of Mediterranean revivals and classical gestures that promise permanence but often deliver pastiche. Enter Studio KHORA, one of only four U.S. firms named among the Top 100 Luxury Architects of the World by Luxury Lifestyle Awards. Their presence on that list is not just recognition—it is responsibility: to represent American architecture at its most daring. For ten consecutive years, Ocean Home Magazine has ranked them among the top 50 coastal U.S. architects, underscoring their commitment to reimagining what coastal luxury can be.
What makes a contemporary mansion in their hands is less a matter of grandeur than of inquiry. Consider the AIA award–winning G House, a $50 million contemporary mansion that redefines coastal living in Palmetto Bay, just south of Miami. On its surface, it is monumental. But what lingers is not its size; it is the lyricism of its design—light crossing walls, shadow dissolving edges, a house performing like choreography. Value, again, is not derived from its adjacency to other estates, but from its singularity, its staging of relation: space, horizon, inhabitant, and idea.
$50 million contemporary mansion - G House - Studio KHORA - Photo courtesy of SoFlo Re Visuals
By contrast, at 3310 and 3306 NE 16th Street in Fort Lauderdale, Studio KHORA created something more intimate: two mirrored courtyard houses of roughly 5,000 square feet each. They appear as twins, aligned across a shared pool and choreography of landscaping. Look closer, and you see a rupture in the familiar logic of real estate comparables. These homes don’t compete with their neighbors; they face each other, locked in a dialogue of light and reflection. Here, return on investment is recalibrated—not by the familiar yardstick of comparables, but by comparison: two houses locked in luminous conversation, generating value through presence and relation. Like a geode cracked open to reveal its amethyst interior, these houses present beauty not outwardly to the street, but inwardly, to each other—an opening that transforms their context.
Fort Lauderdale, with its intercoastal waterways and quieter rhythms, is not the obvious stage for this drama. Yet it is precisely here that Studio KHORA has found a canvas. Their senior designer sees the intercoastal not as a relic of past luxury but as an opening, a surface waiting to be inscribed. The city’s proximity to the Bahamas, its less frenetic tempo, its panoramic horizons—these elements conspire to create a geography where architecture can both belong and stand apart. If Miami dazzles with spectacle, Fort Lauderdale, in Khora’s hands, reveals through relation.
And that is the point: Studio KHORA dismantles the binaries—inside/outside, spectacle/market, tradition/innovation—and replaces them with tension, intimacy, dialogue. The mirrored courtyard homes are not houses but sentences. The G House is not shelter but stanza. To dwell within is to dwell in a philosophy: a reminder that architecture, at its highest order, is not about permanence but about opening—into space, into meaning, into possibility.
It’s why Studio KHORA belongs in conversation with Bjarke Ingels, Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando. Yet their resonance is distinct. Where others impose, Studio KHORA refracts. Where others announce, they question. And in Fort Lauderdale, a city once bound by borrowed languages, they have created their own—an architecture of luminous conversation.
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Company Name: Studio KHORA
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Country: United States
Website: https://www.studiokhora.com/
