Villa Mia Design began in Miami in the fall of 2021, but the seeds were planted decades earlier, in a Paris apartment lined with my father's architectural blueprints and my mother's hand refinished furniture.
My father was an architect, my mother an artist, and I grew up surrounded by blueprints, color samples, paints and brushes, and the conviction that beauty and structure belong together.
I trained first as a litigation attorney in France, then moved to Miami and spent seventeen years as a Strategic Site Acquisition and Wireless Infrastructure Program Manager for AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. I learned everything that matters about project planning, entitlement, due diligence, permitting, construction, and compliance at a large infrastructure scale. I learned how to work with attorneys, jurisdictions, and contractors. And most importantly, I learned how to solve, on a daily basis, the problems that arise on a real construction site.
All the while I never stopped photographing. I built my first analog film lab inside my student apartment, and I have spent the years since chasing light, shadow, water, and architecture through a camera.
In the summer of 2021, after a long stretch of running infrastructure programs, I let myself listen to what friends and family had been saying for years: that I had an eye for rooms, for color, for the place a sofa wants to sit. That October, a close friend who manages luxury short-term rentals in Miami, offered me my first project, a four bedroom waterfront villa that needed a designer who could also run the renovation. I designed it, project managed the renovation, sourced and installed the furniture, finished the walls with my own photography, and it became one of the most booked properties in her portfolio.
Villa Mia Design has grown out of that first project. We are a boutique studio for investors and homeowners who want a property that feels like a place, not a product. We design with warmth and color, we run the build with the discipline of a program, and we sign every home with original art from my own camera. That is the studio, and that is my promise.
- Julie Dubernard -
