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"View Slideshow\n\nBaseball celebrity Mike Piazza, a longtime Florida resident, was living in a small house in Boynton Beach, north of Miami. \"But with the new communities moving up the coast and all the new traffic, I decided to move down the coast,\" he says. Counterintuitively, he chose to relocate to South Beach, in the thick of it, where an apartment in a high-rise would lift him above the traffic and crowds. Two years ago he found an apartment tower with circumferential views. \"I liked the privacy of it\u2014there's only one other unit on the floor,\" he says. \"And I work all summer, so I wanted a place where I could turn the key and feel the apartment was secure when I was away.\"\n\nGiven a choice of floors in the new building, number 31 of the New York Mets went for the 31st floor. \"I figured it was good karma,\" says Piazza.\n\nAt home on the baseball diamond, the athlete suddenly faced the prospect of heavy lifting at Miami's Design Center of the Americas in order to furnish his 3,100-square-foot piece of sky. He contacted Florida-based designer Alexandra Karram, whose work he admired for its clean, contemporary lines. Together they went shopping. \"She got a feel for the direction I wanted to go,\" he says, and the shopping led to a commission: He asked her to design and furnish the whole apartment, from the floor plan to the linens.\n\nTurns out he knew more about design than she did about baseball. \"I didn't know a thing about the sport, but I learn fast,\" she says. \"I went to a few games and started reading everything about baseball, understanding it, getting inspired about what I could design for Mike.\"\n\nSome designers begin with the rug, or they work from the fireplace out into the room, but in the case of an apartment for number 31, Karram started with the accessories\u2014that is, baseball's accessories. \"I bought a baseball and a mitt just to get a feeling for the sport. I try to put myself in my clients' world\u2014why they do what they do, why they are successful at it, what they would want a home to be.\" Baseball's props offered some hints. The glove, for starters, was leather, as was the baseball, and both were cross-stitched at the seams. The baseball had red lettering.\n\n\"What I like about mitts,\" she says, \"is that the leather changes color with time and use. And the cross-stitching establishes a pattern.\" She was picking up on cues that she could import from the diamond so her client could feel, subconsciously, at home off the field.\n\nKarram was taking on baseball as a visual metaphor for the apartment, but she came to the project with her own established reputation, and what Piazza saw and liked about her work was the big picture, beyond accessories: \"I knew her tastes suited the building, which is pretty modern,\" he says. Before she got into the details, she wiped the slate clean and took the apartment down to the shell, erasing the existing pro forma, plain-vanilla layout to get a fresh purchase on the space.\n\nThe great asset of high-rise apartments often resides outside the apartment, in thin air. Piazza's new building offered vertiginous views of the port, the Miami skyline and the ocean. Besides, there were all the dazzling atmospheric effects of the sun and moon rising and setting, clouds forming and rains pouring. \"You can see the thunderstorms heading your way,\" he says.\n\nKarram decided to play the rooms to the view, as though they provided the seats for a 180-degree Imax screen. The living room embodies Karram's principle of extroversion. The space has a curved wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that fans out over the panorama, and the designer positioned the furniture so that the room faced the big celestial picture. Two modular sofas confront the view, but with an added convenience: The parts can easily be reconfigured and rearranged for parties.\n\nWith the main event beyond the windows, Karram quiets the interior visually so it does not compete. The tranquillity starts with the floor, which she covered in a limestone that gives way, in the bedrooms, to limestone-colored carpets. She sustained the beige palette throughout the apartment, using wenge as an accent at the baseboards and doorframes. \"The limestone and wenge, the light and the dark, have a nice contrast, and along with the light window treatments, the combination fits the moods of South Beach,\" notes Piazza.\n\nThe clean lines that defer to the view also defer to the quiet textures and understated details. The sofas in the living room are upholstered in a fabric that rewards the touch. The tactility extends to pillows covered in squares of hair-on-hide leather patched together and cross-stitched. Many chairs throughout the apartment are clad in leather, and Karram even brings the motif into the master bedroom, where she upholstered the entire wall behind the bed in squares of beige leather.\n\nThe red that Karram noticed on the baseball appears on the dining table in a splash of art glass by Dale Chihuly. She carries a version of the color over into the guest room, painting one wall head to toe in a burnt red. \"I tried to establish a flow,\" she says, \"a consistency between spaces.\" The baseball metaphor, however, never became a cartoon but stayed subtle: \"She just put a little spin in that direction,\" says Piazza. \"We didn't want to go over the top.\"\n\nA baseball player with Piazza's record and career batting average of .311 owns a lot of trophies. \"But I didn't have a basement or a pool room where we could put everything out, so Alexandra picked some nice pieces and was careful not to overwhelm the apartment,\" he says. \"She featured a couple of the Silver Slugger awards, which my friends seem to like to see.\"\n\nJust about the time most of the decisions were made and Piazza was well on his way to occupying a strong, silent type of apartment, he married, and his bride, Alicia, helped him sand off the bachelor edges. \"Alexandra and I had worked out the floor plan and bought the bulk of the furniture, but Alicia came in at the end and helped make the house a home. It was nice to get the feminine touches, that softness.\" His wife suggested the silk-and-wool shag rug that seems to cushion the living room, and she and Karram helped Piazza choose the contemporary paintings.\n\n\"It's a timeless place,\" he says. \"That's what we were striving for. But there were a lot of surprises and then all the waiting. Something that was supposed to arrive in four to six weeks would be rescheduled for six to eight weeks and then postponed to 10 weeks. But when it was finally finished and we moved in and spent our first night, it was beautiful and held a lot of meaning for us.\" Piazza remembers that Alicia said that it seemed as though their parents would call any minute, to tell them to come home. \"It was our first home together, and it felt like we were pretending,\" he says.\n\nPiazza's career, in the meantime, has moved on: He is now number 33 with the San Diego Padres. \"I'm in the threes for some reason\u2014I was 34 in the minors.\" But the Piazzas probably won't be looking soon for the 33rd floor of an apartment tower in San Diego. \"We're always going to be connected to Miami. That's where I went to college. This is our home.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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