Miami Beach Luxury Garage
Innovation lures luxury fashion, celebrity parties,penthouse dwellers, restaurant and, oh yes, 300 cars
Come and see the new innovative garage in Miami Beach. A seventh-level aerie atop a surreal parking garage that serves at times as party space !
This $65-million bravura composition of intersecting planes and angular piers, called 1111 Lincoln Road, does indeed park 300 cars in its mostly wall-free structure. It includes fashion retailers and residences.
The different levels rhythmically jut forward and recede. The floor heights range from the parking standard of about seven feet to as high as 34 feet.
The architectural allure and the view are why the garage is in demand for weddings and other fetes. Developer Robert Wennett, president of Urban Investment Advisors, cooked up an idiosyncratic commercial formula: Architecturally spectacular parking structure attracts high-end retail, which helps sell a penthouse residence and attract events.
Standing improbably alone on the fifth floor, a glass jewel box of a store is a delight to encounter. Called Alchemist, it sets out the wares of sought-after designers such as Rick Owens, Martin Margiela and Chrome Hearts as if they were precious artworks. It need not share street frontage with beachwear boutiques because it is a destination for aficionados. With only parked cars for company, the cognitive dissonance of its location telegraphs chic.
Wennett is finishing an all-glass rooftop restaurant and building a penthouse residence.
By any conventional real-estate formula, neither the building form nor the odd revenue-producing combination makes any sense. It’s hard to see where the architectural concept ends and Wennett’s commercial savvy begins.
Technically the garage is an addition to a beefy, unloved cast-concrete building put up in 1968 and formerly occupied by SunTrust bank. Its deeply recessed windows and bulging forms shout fortress.
With $6.2 million from the city of Miami Beach, landscape architect-du-jour Raymond Jungles extended the pedestrian mall a full block to front 1111. He installed striped black-and-white stone paving, towering bald cypresses, round burbling pools and a curvy Dan Graham glass sculpture.
This bossa nova setting helped Wennett lure high-style fashion retailers as well as Taschen, an art-book store, Inkanta, a design store, and a just-opened Miami outpost of restaurateur Danny Meyer’s Shake Shack. Wennett personally sought the retailers he thought would make the whole add up to more than the sum of its parts.
It’s a landmark to Miami’s increasingly cosmopolitan and international allure.
JAMES S. RUSSELL
BLOOMBERG NEWS
(Jul 24, 2010)
