The Design District, Slowly

The Design District is usually described in brand names. Spend an afternoon there without an errand and it reads differently: shade, courtyards, the sound of a fountain behind a wall.\n\nWe walked it with a furniture maker and a florist who both work two streets away. Their Miami is small, specific and unhurried — a few blocks they know by the hour of the day.\n\nWhat stays with you is not the retail. It is the architecture of pause: benches, colonnades, a long stretch of stone that stays cool at four in the afternoon.