I was sitting with Sheena Santiago, getting a private presentation of Atelier Residences Miami when she got to something called the CAYA Members’ Club.
By then, we had already covered quite a bit. Atelier is coming to The Roads; there are 146 residences. Most of them are studios; they come furnished, and there’s a rental program, a pool, a restaurant, a sauna, a steam room, a cold plunge, and all the other things you apparently need in a Miami condo now because simply having a swimming pool is no longer enough.
Sheena walked me through the different levels of the building and explained that CAYA stood for “Come As You Are.”
I liked that. Although in Miami, it usually requires a reservation.
Still, “come as you are” is a pretty interesting thing to tell a bunch of people buying luxury condos in Miami.
I mean, how often do any of us actually come as we are?
When you first meet somebody, you’re usually getting the best version of them. They’re a little more patient, a little more interesting, probably dressed a little better, and definitely paying more attention.
You’re basically giving somebody a presentation of yourself, which is funny because I had just left the sales gallery. Everything is clean, the lighting is right, and somebody has hidden all the stuff that normally sits on the counter.
You aren’t lying about the square footage. You’re just not taking them into the utility closet yet.
The representative is patient, listens, and doesn’t have weird moods for no identifiable reason. They’re certainly not volunteering every annoying habit or every reason you might eventually get tired of them.
You have to earn access to that person.
And it’s not just when you’re meeting somebody. We do this everywhere.
Go to a job interview, and suddenly everybody loves working with teams and considers caring too much one of their biggest weaknesses. Walk into somebody’s house for the first time, and you probably don’t open their refrigerator or put your feet on the coffee table. Give it six months, and you might be doing both.
Some of y’all could actually edit a little more.
Which is why I kept coming back to the name CAYA.
A luxury condo sales gallery is pretty much the opposite of “come as you are.” Everything is perfect. Nobody has Amazon boxes sitting outside their door or a towel hanging over a chair because they forgot to put it away.
Of course, that’s the point. Nobody is spending millions of dollars on a condo because the rendering really captured the laundry situation.
Sheena described CAYA as a members’ club on the third level with a lounge, coffee and juice station, and flexible spaces for meetings and gatherings. You can grab a coffee, get some work done, meet somebody downstairs, or just sit there for a while.
Maybe “Come As You Are” wasn’t such a bad name after all.
Sheena probably spent less than a minute explaining CAYA to me. She had an entire building to show me, and I’m sure there were more important things she wanted me to remember about Atelier than the members’ club name.
To be fair, I did remember the residences, the amenities, and the rental program. I even wrote an entire article about Atelier for Miami Deal Flow, so I wasn’t completely wasting her time.
But of everything she showed me that day, somehow “Come As You Are” is what sent me down this ridiculous rabbit hole.
Sheena, if you’re reading this, I promise I was paying attention.
