Miami-based interior architect Ruby Ramirez brings playful zest to the projects she designs throughout South Florida and around the world.
BY JEAN NAYAR
Every project designed by Ruby Ramirez tells a unique visual story. The peripatetic Miami-based interior architect approaches each home, restaurant, or hotel from the perspective of its inhabitants, ensuring that “no two projects—or the stories they tell—are alike.”
Born in the Philippines, Ramirez moved to the U.S. as a child, living in Connecticut and L.A. before settling in Miami, where she earned a degree in architecture from FIU. She honed her skills at local firms, designing everything from airports and schools to bespoke homes.
A major career shift came in 2006 when she was invited to join YOO, the global design studio founded by John Hitchcox and Philippe Starck. She managed the new Miami office, serving as a lead designer for the high-profile residential development Icon Brickell. This success led her to London, where she worked alongside celebrated designers like Marcel Wanders, Kelly Hoppen, and Jade Jagger on marquee projects across the globe—from Moscow and Mumbai to Istanbul and Singapore.
Ramirez credits her time at YOO with sparking her current design approach. Working with Starck and the other designers instilled a “light, uplifting, playfulness” in her work. “I’m really just a big kid, naturally playful at heart,” she says, emphasizing that remaining “childlike and be a wider dreamer” is essential for a designer. This lively energy carried over when she set off on her own with a partner in 2011 and later established Studio Ramirez in Miami in 2020, where she now leads a team of eight.
Ramirez’s relentless search for fresh ideas is often fueled by her extensive travels. As a committed “foodie” with her Dutch husband, she finds inspiration everywhere: from the visual layering of a Michelin-star dish in France to the unique color combinations of packaging in Poland. This wide-open approach means “nothing about the way I see is pure—everything is distilled through a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural filter.”
She loves to “shake things up” by upending standard notions of building types, often injecting elements of a well-appointed boutique hotel lobby into a private residence to create “curated nuance to the act of living.” This “mix and match” approach, pulling “tricks from different places,” helps create a unique sense of place and keeps things fun.
Color and texture are also tweaked to suit a mission or context. For Palma, a residential development in North Beach, she created a “South of France-meets-South Florida
atmosphere” by de-saturating Miami’s vivid greens and sunset hues, instead bringing in the Mediterranean resort feeling with texture and details, such as planters wrapped in tiles.
While Ramirez avoids a predictable signature style, a delightful sense of playfulness and joy is the common thread that links all her work. Her private residential clients, who are often “under-the-radar” figures from fields like finance and software development and reside in exclusive locales such as Fisher Island, welcome this spirit.
Similarly, her commercial hospitality and multi-family clients—such as the Mondrian Residences in Hallandale Beach or the historic Bath Club and Palma in Miami Beach—value her skill. She now serves many of them through Row 01, a new division of her company co-founded last year with real estate development expert Vianny Sanguily. Whether residential or commercial, even though each of the stories Ramirez tells through her projects may be unique, all invariably wind up with a happy ending.
