3840 La Playa Boulevard

Lot 178 of Utopia, a subdivision recorded in Dade County Plat Book 8 at page 94, on a corner of La Playa Boulevard in the South Grove. The county card dates the house to 1925, the year Coconut Grove, which had incorporated as its own municipality in 1919, was annexed by the City of Miami. The streets the plat drew kept their Spanish names and still carry them: La Playa, El Prado, Ventura, Utopia Court.

Three bedrooms and two baths in 1,635 square feet, with the ceilings following the pitch of the roof and the beams left exposed and painted white. Living and dining run together as one room under that volume, so the plan is tall rather than wide. The kitchen and both baths have been rebuilt, every window and door is impact-rated, and a 309 square foot addition was recorded in 2006.

The pool has been in the ground since 1965. Around it, 1,100 square feet of brick, tile and flagstone laid in 2018, the joints left open and planted with grass, a pergola, a covered terrace, and a hedge run to the property line with the gate set into it. The roof and the perimeter fence date to the same 2018 round of work.

Utopia keeps a security association of its own, incorporated in Florida in 1992 and still patrolling the plat's four streets. The village centre, Peacock Park and the Dinner Key marinas are a short way downhill, in the part of Miami that was a town before Miami was.

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