Jean-Louis Deniot Renovated This Luxury Miami Penthouse

Top interior designer Jean-Louis Deniot stripped a South Beach penthouse to the bare cement for a striking home with Art Deco nods, and Design Limited Edition brings the tour of this exquisite design project.

The master bath’s walls, vanity, and flooring are in a coordinating marble.

The entry’s French 1940s bronze-and-marble console is from Gallery Yves Gastou, and the artwork is by Stephenie Bergman.

When renovating the Miami penthouse, one of Jean-Louis Deniot‘s design inspirations was the Brancusi atelier in Paris. In photographs of the studio, a monochromatic blue canvas is surrounded by sculptures, some on rough-hewn pedestals. Miami’s Art Deco scene was another influence, the designer gravitated toward the style of Gerrit Rietveld, a Dutch designer of the period, whose work was geometric and avant-garde. In the living room, the walls were stripped to the bare concrete, which was never meant to be visible.

Jean-Louis Deniot Renovated This Luxury Miami Penthouse (6) — In the breakfast area, a custom table is framed by midcentury chairs in velvet; a custom glass-and-bronze bar cabinet is topped with a 1980s cement vase, a French 1940s carafe, and a 19th-century Nigerian helmet.

But once exposed, it looked like beautiful stone, textured and vibrant, and Jean-Louis Deniot left it untouched. He lined the entry corridor with brass panels to reflect the light; it makes the space look bigger, and the effect is pure sunshine. The flooring is newly installed terrazzo — a nod to classic mid-century Miami.

Everything in the living room needed to be on a huge scale to balance the room’s height. The sofa is giant, the concrete head on a pedestal is massive, and the 1920s Italian terrazzo fragment of a nose and mouth on the white shelf near the ceiling is much bigger than it appears — more than two feet tall. If decorating a room is like creating a story (and to Jean-Louis Deniot, it always is), then this living room is a tale of the sea.

Jean-Louis Deniot Renovated This Luxury Miami Penthouse (7) — The kitchen’s custom stainless steel cabinetry has been laser-printed with an abstract pattern, the bronze pendant is custom, and the flooring is terrazzo.

The artist designed the cabinet in straw marquetry to hide the television set. It’s the blue of the deepest ocean, and it rests on lacquered wooden balls shaped like beach balls (the shape also references both Art Deco and Memphis design). On top of the cabinet, a row of onyx cones reminisces shark’s teeth. The cocktail table has the form of a surfboard, and Jean-Louis Deniot designed the rug’s pattern to resemble sand and water.

Jean-Louis Deniot Renovated This Luxury Miami Penthouse (8) — On the terrace facing South Beach, there’s a vintage rocking chair, a 1960s rattan chaise covered in an outdoor Kravet fabric, and the marble side table is from a Paris flea market.

The ceiling in the master bedroom is just eight feet high. To make it look loftier, Jean-Louis Deniot commissioned an artist in Paris to paint a canvas of a storm or massive wave. They put the painting on a boat to Miami and glued it in place in the bedroom. The swirling pattern almost appears like a dome. In the master bath, which has a bird’s-eye view of the Intracoastal Waterway, the top interior designer wanted the marble to look like a landscape.

On the terrace facing South Beach, the Ilmari Tapiovaara rocking chair is vintage, a 1960s rattan chaise is covered in an outdoor Kravet fabric, and the marble side table is from a Paris flea market.

Jean-Louis Deniot found a stone in Miami with beautiful veining — it looks very Art Deco—and covered every surface in it, along with the vanity, and even designed a matching marble waste bin.

In this penthouse, 26 stories above the ground, you feel as if you are floating above the beach, the neighbouring buildings, and even the clouds. You can see birds flying by. It’s a very poetic, serene, and some might say surrealistic way to live.