Italian Marble Kitchens for Miami and Florida

Michelessi is a family stone workshop on the Via Pontina in Aprilia, between Rome and Latina, where marble has been cut, honed and fitted since 1976. Today the same workshop designs and builds bespoke indoor marble kitchens and outdoor kitchens in marble and stone for homes in Italy and abroad, and Miami is one of the places we imagine them living. Here is how a kitchen made in Aprilia reaches a residence in Miami Beach, Coral Gables or Palm Beach.

We are not a dealer and we do not sell from a catalogue: we are a workshop with an in-house technical office, numerically controlled cutting centres and artisans who have handled stone all their working lives. Everything is drawn, cut and finished under our own roof before it leaves for the port.

Marble is a block that has to be read. Our slabs are chosen one by one, so that a Calacatta island shows the vein you approved and not a distant cousin of it; book-matched pages of stone are laid side by side so the veining runs on from the worktop to the waterfall side and into the splashback.

The cut is made on numerically controlled machines that transfer the 3D design onto the slab to the millimetre; then the hand takes over where the machine cannot go: matching the veins, polishing the edges, mitring the corners of solid-looking islands, cutting the openings for sink and hob. Worktops are typically 2 or 3 cm thick. The result is a joint as fine as a pencil line and a worktop that arrives finished and settles into place.

• Italian marbles and stones: Calacatta, Bianco Carrara, Statuario, Nero Marquina, Roman travertine, onyx.
• Engineered surfaces: Dekton, Laminam, Fenix and quartz, for the look of stone with fewer demands.
• Modular kitchens with stone tops, or a kitchen drawn from a blank sheet.

A marble kitchen is built to the exact dimensions of its room. When that room is across the Atlantic, the method does not change; four steps simply receive extra care, as on our page on Italian marble kitchens worldwide.

Measurements

We ask for photographs of the space, hand-drawn measurements of the walls, and the position of windows, sockets, drains and appliances. If an architect or contractor is working on the house, we speak with them directly and receive their drawings; where the project calls for it, our own team checks the final measurements on site before cutting.

The 3D design

From the measurements comes the three-dimensional design: the finished kitchen set within your room, with the units, the finishes and the veining of the chosen slab. You refine it with us and approve it before the stone is touched: what you see in the drawing is what comes out of the crate.

Samples shipped to Florida

The colour of a marble cannot be judged on a screen, least of all under the strong light of a Florida afternoon. We send samples of the stones and finishes under consideration, to be compared in the real light of your room, against your floors and joinery. The final slab is photographed in full and approved by you before cutting.

Video calls

Over a video call, in English or Italian, we show you the slabs available, the chosen slab before cutting, the work in progress and, where the project allows, the kitchen dry-assembled before packing.

Marble is heavy and, in its thinner sections, fragile: it travels well only if it is packed well. Every finished element is protected individually, braced in made-to-measure wooden crates and numbered in the order of installation; the 3D design travels with the shipment like a map. The means of transport, by sea or by air, the schedule and the customs formalities are defined in the quotation, according to the destination.

A marble kitchen is finished only once it is fitted. Installation is carried out by our own team: the artisans who followed the work in Aprilia travel with their tools, verify the measurements on site, level the worktops, close the joints along the veining and hand over a kitchen ready for use. Where a local contractor is involved, we coordinate them with working drawings and the assembly sequence. That is the method of our Dubai project: made in Aprilia, installed by our own artisans.

Miami asks a great deal of a kitchen: humidity all year, a sun that bleaches and heats, salt air a few streets from the ocean. Our advice on materials takes this into account from the first drawing.

• Indoors: marble, natural stone, Dekton, Fenix and quartz. Marble is protected with an impregnating sealer against water and grease; where lime and citrus are on the worktop daily, a honed finish shows less than a polished one.
• Outdoors, near the water: granite, true quartzite and sintered stone stand up to sun, rain and salt air with little upkeep; pale, honed and sealed marble or travertine suits serving surfaces and pool copings, and heats up far less than dark stone. Stainless steel by the sea should be grade 316.
• In contact with fire: refractory stone only.

Our guide on which stone to choose for an outdoor kitchen compares the materials one by one.

Where the table can be laid outside for most of the year, the outdoor kitchen is a second kitchen, not an accessory. We build it in granite, quartzite, sintered stone and stainless steel, with island, sink, burners and grill, and where the project calls for live fire we add a barbecue or wood-fired oven in refractory stone: the material of bread ovens, which takes the swing from cold to several hundred degrees without cracking. For outdoor kitchens and barbecues we use neither cement nor masonry; in direct contact with the flame, refractory stone only.

Among the projects we imagine for the places we wish to reach there is the Miami Beach vision: an oceanfront villa of pale surfaces, with floors of Calacatta Oro, Roman travertine descending towards the sand, an outdoor kitchen hollowed from a single block of Navona travertine and a master bathroom walled in white onyx. It is a vision, not a delivered work: a drawing of how we would approach a residence on the Atlantic shore. Our project abroad is Dubai; the vision is our invitation to write the next chapter with you.

What brings a house in Miami, in Florida or anywhere in North America to a workshop in Aprilia is one thing: a marble kitchen truly built in Italy, by the hands that chose the block. Homeowners, architects and developers are all welcome. Send us photographs and measurements through our contact page, by e-mail or on WhatsApp, and we will reply with a first proposal and a quotation. Which room, and which stone, shall we begin with?