Camp Biscayne has One of the Best Luxury Homes in Miami.

Camp Biscayne is a handful of houses on the bay side of South Coconut Grove, and it sits on the site of what was, in a real sense, Miami’s first resort. In 1903 Commodore Ralph Middleton Munroe opened Camp Biscayne “a few lots south of the Barnacle” — eleven cottages, each named for a native or ornamental tree, and a main lodge whose dining room seated 100. It closed in 1925. The name stayed on the land.

The Commodore, and how this land came to exist

Ralph Middleton Munroe first saw South Florida in 1877, on holiday from New York. He came back for good in 1882, after his wife’s death. In 1886 he bought 40 acres of Biscayne Bay frontage for $400 — a figure worth pausing on, because those forty acres are now among the most valuable residential land in the United States.

The Barnacle, lifted rather than extended

In 1891 he built the Barnacle, a single-storey bungalow. In 1908, needing more room, he did something characteristic of a man who designed boats for a living: rather than build upward in the conventional way, he lifted the entire house and inserted a new ground floor underneath it. The house still stands, still on its original site, and the Florida Park Service acquired the remaining five acres from his descendants in 1973.

Why the street pattern followed the trees

Munroe was not a developer in the modern sense. He was a yacht designer — 56 vessels over his lifetime — and a wrecker, and he served as Commodore of the Biscayne Bay Yacht Club, founded in 1887, for 22 years. Camp Biscayne, opened in 1903 on lots just south of his own house, was an extension of that life: somewhere for northern friends and sailing people to winter, built low and among the trees rather than cleared and platted.

That is why this pocket of the Grove looks the way it does. It was never subdivided by a boom-era land company chasing lot counts. It was assembled by a man who wanted to keep the hardwood hammock and put the buildings in the gaps.

What survives, and what you are actually buying

Camp Biscayne closed in 1925 and the resort is gone. What remains is the land, the canopy that Munroe declined to clear, the street pattern that followed the trees rather than a grid, and a state park on the bay next door that can never be developed.

The state park next door

That last point is the durable one. The Barnacle Historic State Park is publicly owned bayfront in perpetuity. In a neighbourhood where every other waterfront parcel is under permanent redevelopment pressure, an adjoining property that cannot be built on is a structural amenity — the kind that does not depend on a neighbour’s goodwill or a zoning vote.

NCD-3: the rules that actually govern what you can build

This is the part that decides projects, and it is almost never explained to buyers before they are under contract.

All of residential Coconut Grove sits inside NCD-3, the Coconut Grove Neighborhood Conservation District, whose stated purpose is to “preserve the historic, heavily landscaped character of Coconut Grove’s residential areas” and to “enhance and protect Coconut Grove’s natural features such as the tree canopy and green space.” Camp Biscayne falls in the South Grove sub-district.

The provisions that catch buyers out

The provisions that most often surprise people:

Read together, these are not arbitrary. They are a deliberate machine for producing exactly the neighbourhood Munroe left behind: low buildings, deep front gardens, cars out of view, and canopy over everything. A buyer who wants that is buying an enforceable guarantee of it. A buyer who wants a tall contemporary volume on a hard edge is in the wrong postcode, and should be told so before the survey is ordered.

Tree protection

Separately, the City of Miami operates tree protection provisions, and in a hammock neighbourhood these matter as much as the zoning. Assume that any specimen tree on the lot is a design constraint rather than a landscaping decision, and get an arborist’s read before an architect draws a footprint.

Diligence specific to this pocket

• Survey the canopy before the house. On a South Grove lot the buildable envelope is usually defined by the trees and the 30% green space rule, not by the setbacks alone. This routinely removes 20–30% of the footprint a buyer assumed.
• Confirm access and easements. Lanes in this part of the Grove are old, narrow and occasionally private. Who maintains the surface, who has rights over it, and what a construction vehicle can physically reach are all real questions here.
• Seawall, dock and riparian rights if the parcel touches water. Seawall remaining life is a six-figure question. Dock permitting runs through Miami-Dade and is not automatic.
• Flood zone and elevation certificate first. The Grove’s ridge is one of the higher elevations in the county, and elevation varies sharply within a few hundred feet. It drives the insurance number, which increasingly drives the deal.
• Septic versus sewer. Parts of older South Grove remain on septic. Connection status and any county conversion requirement should be confirmed in writing, not assumed.

Market context

Camp Biscayne trades as single-family, in the tight half of a divided county.

Miami-Dade single-family in June 2026: median $695,000, up 3.7% year over year, 1,049 closed sales (up 16.8%), active inventory down 22.7% to 4,380, and 4.9 months of supply — a seller’s market by any standard reading. Condominiums in the same month: 11,550 listings, 12.3 months of supply, median down 3.1%.

Why county medians do not apply here

Those county medians are context, not comparables. A handful of properties on a historic bayfront pocket beside a state park do not track a county median, and any valuation here rests on a small number of transactions plus judgement about land, canopy, water and buildable envelope. Anyone quoting a confident price per foot for Camp Biscayne is extrapolating from too little data.

The honest summary

This is one of the few Miami addresses where the history is not marketing. Munroe bought the land in 1886, kept the trees, opened Camp Biscayne in 1903, and the state now owns the bayfront next door. NCD-3 keeps buildings low and gardens deep. Nothing about the character of this pocket depends on the market behaving.

The trade-off is that you cannot do whatever you like with it, and the buildable envelope is smaller than the lot size suggests. For the right buyer that is precisely the appeal.

See also Coconut Grove, the full neighbourhood guide and Miami’s waterfront housing market.

Related reading: Tahiti Beach · properties above $10 million · neighbouring Coral Gables.