The Spinning Carousel at the Heart of LE Miami — Custom-Built by Gilded Group

Some projects test you. This one thrilled us. Since 2013, LE Miami has been the invitation-only luxury travel trade show that gathers the world's design-led hotels, elite travel buyers, and top media in Miami Beach each year. For its 2025 conference, Gilded Group designed and fabricated the central hub of the entire conference floor at the city's famous Convention Center: a 24-foot carousel that doubled as the bar-back for a 40-foot-diameter bar.

LE Miami is one of the most exclusive, design-forward gatherings in luxury travel, so its conference floor central hub has to match or exceed the energy of the year before — always with one assignment: command the room. Our biggest challenge here was making the massive carousel spin. To pull it off, we engineered the full structure to be as lightweight as possible, to minimize friction on the rotating motor platform. Every material was color-matched to the brand's exact Pantone, so the whole structure read as one seamless surface.

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Every carousel horse was practically a sculpture. Each was built by hand — 3D geometric tiles installed one by one, gilded in silver, then finished with mirror cut to fit each individual shape across 50% of the surface. To maximize the effect of rotation, the carousel was designed to both delight the guests circled around the bar and double as a light reflector — serving as a giant disco ball, where focused light sources aimed on the mirror details threw beams across the darkened conference space.

Not the easiest project we've ever done, but not the hardest either. We came, we built, we conquered — on to the next challenge we go.
This is what Gilded Group does: we're custom fabricators and experiential designers building brand activations and luxury conference environments across Miami, Orlando, and beyond.
A special thanks to @psidgroup for always being by our side.

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Lighting by @gravitateproductions