Piers Taylor and Caroline Quentin travel to Florida, USA, to discover how high-end design and a celebrated architectural heritage combine to produce extraordinary homes

Canal House is for sale at nearly $30 million! But does a price tag like that guarantee the very best in design? It certainly gets you an incredible waterfront plot on Miami's celebrated Indian Creek. And it also affords you a home designed by one of the world's top 100 architects, Marcio Kogan. The house is essentially two striking concrete boxes stacked at right angles with an incredible cinemascopic facade, set in a tropical landscape and entered by a long curving bridge. It is one of the largest homes ever to feature on the series.

The second home is considerably smaller, but just as much an architectural heavyweight. Brillhart House is a self-build project by architects Jacob and Melissa. Taking inspiration from the great American modernists of the 40s and 50s, they have built a beautifully elegant pavilion perched lightly in a lush jungle of a garden.

A trip north to Sarasota takes Piers and Caroline to Spencer House. Beth and Gary Spencer wanted a home in the style of the Sarasota Modernists, a famous 20th-century school of architecture. Guy Peterson designed them an ultra-crisp, white modernist home that delivered both light and privacy - as well as an enticing pool. However, it emerges that building such a striking house in a neighbourhood of traditional homes created a fair amount of controversy.

Back in Miami, Piers and Caroline head for South Beach to find Prairie House. This unique home consists of three separate buildings raised on stilts which put all the main living spaces in amongst the treetops. For Caroline it is 'a class act' of concrete, glass, bronze and steel. This sensual house belongs to self-confessed design obsessive Hany Boutros who took on 'detail freak' Rene Gonzalez to build this awe-inspiring home in the trees. Show less