Despite its name, North Miami Beach sits several miles inland from the ocean, and its identity has always carried a bit of the unexpected — nowhere more so than at the Ancient Spanish Monastery, a nine-hundred-year-old cloister shipped from Spain and reassembled here in the 1950s. The neighborhoods around it filled in during that same era, leaving the city with a solid base of mid-century homes on modest lots, many still running on their original layouts and mechanical systems.

For homeowners here, a remodel usually starts with the bones of the house: rewiring and replumbing what a 1950s or 60s build never anticipated, swapping single-pane windows for impact-rated ones, and reworking a boxy layout into something that suits how people live now. Elbaz Construction builds additions and renovations that match the scale of the surrounding block while quietly modernizing everything the neighbors can’t see.