The Sofa Company Built a Skyscraper: Inside Casa Bella Miami

Miami has a branded tower for every logo in the mall: carmakers, hotel flags, fashion houses. Most of them know marketing far better than they know how anyone actually lives, which is what makes Casa Bella Residences by B&B Italia the interesting exception. B&B Italia has spent six decades obsessing over the curve of a chair and the depth of a sofa cushion, and it just opened its first residential building, a 56-story, 650-foot tower at 1400 Biscayne Boulevard in Downtown Miami, developed with Related Group and Alta Developers. If any brand has earned the right to scale up from furniture to floor plan, it is a furniture brand. The buyers seem to agree: more than 90 percent of its 319 residences are already under contract, with closings underway.

So is it a home, or a 56-story showroom with beds? Designer Piero Lissoni, who curated the interiors, clearly knows the risk, insisting: "It is not a showroom." The evidence inside backs him up better than the slogan does. The design language is restraint in a city that rarely bothers with it: clean lines, quiet proportions, B&B Italia pieces woven through the lobby and shared spaces rather than pasted on as decoration, and residences with private elevator vestibules and bay views doing most of the showing off. The grand gestures are saved for the top, where the ten penthouses come fully furnished by the brand with 12-foot ceilings, and the 56th floor holds a sky pool terrace and observatory. Two floors of amenities, landscaped gardens by Enzo Enea and an 80-foot lap pool fill in the rest, but the hierarchy is right: the homes come first, the theatre and wine cellar second.

The address is a bet as much as the brand is. Casa Bella lands in the Arts and Culture District, minutes from the Pérez Art Museum and the Arsht Center, in a downtown that has added tens of thousands of residents in a decade, and it arrives with Arquitectonica architecture and serious local developers behind it. What the opening materials conspicuously do not include is pricing for the select Cielo and penthouse homes still available, so the real market test is not the branding, it is what those last residences command now that the building can be walked instead of rendered. Branded residences usually sell a fantasy. This one is selling a design philosophy, and for once the people behind the logo actually know what a room needs.

Photography by Robin Hill, courtesy of Casa Bella Residences by B&B Italia.

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