The plan in the brochure is drawn to sell the residence. That is not dishonest. It is simply not the same document as the one you will live in.
This page is about reading the drawing itself. What a specific plan in a specific building actually gives you is a building by building question. Contact the desk at Miami Dossier for the current position on any building we cover.
A marketing floor plan is a plan view: a horizontal slice through the residence, drawn from above, at roughly waist height. Everything above and below that slice is invisible on it. Ceiling height, dropped soffits, bulkheads carrying mechanical runs, the underside of a stair, none of it appears.
That matters more in a tower than in a house, because a tower is a structural system that every residence has to accommodate. The plan shows you where the walls are. It does not always show you which of them cannot move, or what is running through them.
Read the plan for its shape and circulation. Establish everything else in writing.
Ceiling height, and where it changes. A residence marketed at a given height is quoting its best condition. Kitchens, bathrooms, entry halls and anywhere near a duct run are frequently lower. The plan will not tell you where the drop occurs.
Column and shear wall placement. Structural columns are often drawn faintly or absorbed into the wall thickness. A column inside the living room is a permanent piece of furniture you did not choose.
Which walls are structural. Combining two rooms or moving a kitchen is a different conversation depending on the answer, and the answer is not on the marketing sheet.
Slab edge and glass line. Where the glass sits relative to the slab changes how much of the view you get standing back from it.
Mechanical space. Air handlers, water heaters and laundry stacks occupy real area, and in some plans they occupy the closet the drawing implies is yours.
Furniture scale. Marketing plans are frequently drawn with furniture smaller than furniture is. A bed drawn at a size no bed comes in makes a room read larger than it lives.
Put your finger at the front door and move it through the residence the way a person moves through a day. Door to kitchen with shopping. Kitchen to dining. Bedroom to bathroom at night. Guest arriving and needing a powder room without walking past your bed.
Plans fail on circulation far more often than they fail on area. A residence can be generous on paper and still force every route through the living room, which means the living room is a corridor and never quite settles.
Count the corners in the main living space. A room with a single clean seating wall reads calm. A room with four openings into it, however large, is a junction.
Then look at what is on the other side of each bedroom wall. A bedroom sharing a wall with a neighbouring residence’s living space, a lift core, or a refuse chute is a different bedroom from one that does not, and the stack drawing will tell you which you have.
Miami plans commonly quote both an interior area and a total area that includes terraces and sometimes a proportion of the structure. The two can differ substantially, and a residence compared on one figure against a residence quoted on the other is not a comparison at all.
This has its own note, because it is the single most common way two buildings are made to look like each other when they are not.
The practical instruction is short. Establish which figure you are looking at, ask for the other, and compare like against like across every building on your list.
What is the finished ceiling height, and where in this residence does it drop below that?
Which walls in this plan are structural, and where are the columns?
Is the area quoted interior or total, and what is the other figure?
What is on the other side of each bedroom wall, and where does this residence sit in the stack?
What is the window and door specification, and does the terrace glazing match the main glass line?
None of these are difficult questions and none of them are unreasonable to ask. The quality of the answers, and how quickly they arrive in writing, is itself information about the project.
Every point above is answerable for a specific residence in a specific building, and the answers are usually available if somebody asks for them properly. Contact the desk at Miami Dossier and we will go through a plan with you line by line, including the parts a sales gallery would rather skip.
We hold no listings and we are not the developer. Contact the desk at Miami Dossier and we will go through the current position on any building we cover, including the parts a sales gallery would rather skip. Where a question is legal, tax or structuring, we introduce you to advisers who handle that properly rather than answering it ourselves.