Last year, Eamon McLaughlin and Elizabeth Nicolli were just a few steps away from obtaining the permits needed to tear down their 100-year-old home on Gifford Lane.
The couple had moved into their Spanish-style stucco cottage seven years earlier and had fallen in love with their Center Grove neighborhood.
But the home no longer fit their growing family. The cottage needed structural repairs as well, and it was insured by the state’s insurance company of last resort.
Demolition was the best option, according to their architects at the time.
“But we really didn’t want that,” McLaughlin said.
That’s when McLaughlin went for a lucky run through the North Grove.
At the corner of Trapp Avenue and Lucaya Street, he spotted a home renovation project unlike any he could recall – a 1925 cottage, just 825 square feet, restored and joined to a 7,000-square-foot addition built in a matching style.
“Well, this is pretty cool,” he thought.
The restoration project – now just a few months from completion – was the pilot project of TROPICA, a Coconut Grove architecture and landscaping firm founded in 2019.
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The firm offers homeowners an alternative to the “sugar cube” rebuild now common in the Grove by finding ways to modernize century-old cottages while preserving their original character.
TROPICA’s approach was the answer McLaughlin had been waiting for. After a few consultations, the couple shelved their demolition plans and hired TROPICA.
“They got us and what we liked about the Grove,” McLaughlin said. The company “said there were some things that we could save to honor our house but also make it something that we could live in for the rest of our lives.”
The Gifford Lane home is now one of nine cottages dating from the 1920s to the 1940s that TROPICA is designing and rebuilding for homeowners across the North, South and Center Grove. Each one is a house that, in today’s Grove, could just as easily have been bulldozed.
“We are giving life to something that would have otherwise been completely demolished,” TROPICA partner and architect Andrew Aquart said.
In today’s real estate market, it’s an approach that stands out, said AJ Jamasbi of the Ally and AJ real estate team at ONE Sotheby’s.
“A lot of sellers these days want the highest and best prices and usually that leads to a developer that’s going to tear down the whole structure,” Jamasbi said, speaking on behalf of the team.
In Coconut Grove, cottages that are torn down are often replaced by boxy white structures – “sugar cube” homes – that stand in stark contrast to the bohemian Grove style. TROPICA’s work is intended to counter that trend, co-founder Josh Ehrlich said.
TROPICA’s design process begins with the history of each home, Ehrlich said.
Acting like archaeologists, the team takes note of everything from the type of wood in the interior framing to the design of the facade, then carries those details through the expansion.
“Often the most special things about a place that make it special already exist,” Ehrlich said. “It’s just about reviewing them, understanding them, dusting them off and presenting them again in a fresh way.”
Then comes the puzzle: keeping as much of the original structure as possible while giving clients the additional square footage and modern amenities they seek.
“Like 100%, we truly believe that there is a solution to find, and that’s what makes it so exciting for us,” Ehrlich said.
Their solution for the Gifford Lane house? Rip off the roof of the existing home and transform the living room, complete with a decades-old coral rock fireplace, into the courtyard of a new home built around the original structure.
Some projects go through as many as 20 design iterations before settling on a final version, Ehrlich said.
That was the case with a cottage expansion on Swanson Avenue, where the final design preserves the front of the original cottage, while the remainder is traced – or shadowed – on the concrete walls of the addition.
“You can kind of see this trace or this memory of the other pieces of the home that there was no way of keeping,” Ehrlich said.
Aquart said TROPICA’s approach is rooted in Coconut Grove’s own architectural history, pointing to The Barnacle, the historic home of Commodore Ralph Munroe. Munroe expanded the home in the early 20th century by raising the original structure and building a new first story beneath it.
“Here’s this example of expanding on this homestead based on function and need in the heart of the Grove, and now it’s a historic structure,” Aquart said.
But preserving the past isn’t always simple, as Steven Tonkinson, the owner of the Trapp Avenue home, has learned.
“It’s been an undertaking. Timewise, we could’ve been done a while ago, and budget-wise, we could’ve done it cheaper,” Tonkinson said.
He and his wife Sarah Tonkinson began designing his home’s remodel with TROPICA six years ago, after buying the cottage in 2015 for $1.1 million. He hopes to move his family, which has since grown by two children, in before the new year.
Rebuilds with TROPICA cost between $500 and $800 per square foot on average, though TROPICA management said the figure can be nuanced.
That’s about $150 more per square foot than the starting price of a luxury custom new-construction home in Miami which South Florida-based Levy Builders estimates ranges from $350 to $650 per square foot.
Still, Tonkinson is confident he’ll come out ahead, in more ways than one.
“If I look at it from an investment standpoint, it’s still a win. We’re not trying to make a profit here, we’re trying to make an impact,” he said.
Though the upfront cost can be steep, Ally and AJ said a well-restored cottage could ultimately command a higher sales price per square foot than a new build.
TROPICA co-founder Mariella Tzakis says that, for her, the work has always been about more than money.
She grew up in the Grove admiring the eclectic cottages that lined its streets and now lives in a 1,000-square-foot 1946 cottage of her own on Ventura Avenue.
“To be working on these things from kind of a similar space myself is so special,” Tzakis said. “I can’t even fully say how strongly I feel about it, and how lucky I feel.”
As more TROPICA projects are completed, the firm hopes to inspire others to imagine what’s possible — much as Tonkinson’s rebuild on Trapp Avenue inspired McLaughlin and Nicolli to reconsider their options on Gifford Lane.
“I hope we’ve started something,” Tonkinson said.
This story was originally published in the Coconut Grove Spotlight, a WLRN News partner.
