Every outward face of this booth is a mirror.
Not a mirrored panel on one side. The whole exterior: front, flank, the bench surround, all of it polished and reflective inside a brushed aluminum frame. Walk up to it and you do not see a cabinet. You see the room, slightly rearranged.
That was the point, and the reason is about floor space rather than about vanity.
A box that gets smaller as the room fills
La Ferneteria sits nine floors above Wynwood at 230 NW 24th Street, an Italian rooftop with terracotta plaster walls, a brass chandelier with a few dozen bulbs in it, and a wall of glass bottle lockers.
Rooftops are the least forgiving rooms we install into. Not because of weather or power, but because of arithmetic. Every square foot up there is either a seat or it is not earning, and the view is the product. Anything you put on a rooftop has to justify the table it replaces.
A solid cabinet in that room is a solid cabinet. It blocks a sightline, it reads as equipment, and from across the terrace it looks like furniture somebody forgot to move.
A mirrored one behaves differently, and it behaves differently depending on how busy the room is.
Empty in the afternoon, it still reads as a box. That is honest and we are not going to claim otherwise. But fill the terrace at nine on a Friday, put the chandelier on, light the bottle wall, and the booth stops holding its edges. It takes the brass, the bottles, the plaster, the sky and the people standing near it, and it hands all of that straight back.
That is a useful property for exactly one kind of venue: a compact, high value room that is full when it matters. Our booth at Blue Hour Coffee in Milwaukee also has mirrors, but it is a quiet daytime café and the mirrors there are doing something for the guest. Here they are doing something for the room.
Ti amo
One surface breaks the reflection.
On the outer flank, in the bar's dark green, there is a small heart, LA FERNE, and underneath it in a loose handwritten script: Ti amo!
It is printed onto the mirror rather than onto a panel, so it floats on top of whatever the mirror happens to be showing at that moment. Sometimes that is the terrace. Sometimes it is the person standing in front of it.
We did not write it. We worked together with the bar to write that copy to customize to the bar’s experience.
Green
The rest of the specification came out of the room.
The curtain is olive green velvet on grommet rings, which is a darker and more Italian green than we usually hang. The floor plate is a checkerboard in olive and cream with MAJESTIC set into the tiles. The strips print in the same green, with LA FERNETERIA running up one margin and ROOFTOP MIAMI up the other.
Underneath it is our Classic booth, customized to the room rather than chosen from a list, on leveling feet because a rooftop floor is never quite flat. If you want to customize your photo booth, get in touch with us.
{{button}}
Why it is a placement
La Ferneteria did not buy a photo booth. It went in through our Venue Placement program.
No capital, no hardware on the bar's books, and nobody behind that bar thinking about paper, ribbon or a jam on a Saturday night. We designed it with them, they approved the direction before production, we installed it, and we run it. Monitoring, maintenance and service sit with us. They give it space, power and a good position, and it earns more for the rooftop the better it performs.
It also came with ninety days to prove it belonged. If a placement has not shown the value we agreed, we optimize it, move it, or take it out. On a rooftop that matters more than usual, because the alternative use of that space is a table.
The mechanics are set out separately in how a long term booth works.
Where this sits
In Miami it joins Las' Lap and The Sylvester, and it is our second booth in Wynwood.
On rooftops it belongs with Lemon Grove in Hollywood, which is the closest thing we have done to this: an elevated bar where the room is the attraction and the booth has to earn its footprint against a view.
Common questions
Where is the photo booth at La Ferneteria? On the rooftop at La Ferneteria in Wynwood, Miami. It is a long term install rather than an event booth, so it is there whenever the rooftop is open.
Is the whole booth really a mirror? Every outward face of it. The interior is not, because you want soft, even light on a face rather than reflections bouncing around behind you.
How many photos do you get? Three poses, two prints. One to keep and one to give away.
Did the bar have to buy it? No. It went in through our Venue Placement program, which means no capital outlay and no hardware on the venue's books. We design it with them, build it, install it and run it.
Do mirrored booths work outdoors? On a covered rooftop like this one, yes. Fully exposed is a different conversation and depends on the structure, the power and how much weather the spot actually takes. Tell us about the space and we will tell you honestly.
Want one on yours?
We design and build custom photo booths for the room they are going into and install them through our Venue Placement program, with maintenance handled by us. We also run brand activations nationwide.
If you run a rooftop, tell us how many covers you lose to the spot you are considering. That number is the real brief.
{{button}}
.webp)
.webp)