The Fontainebleau Resort, the curvilinear Miami Beach landmark and biggest convention hotel in this resort community, will shutter all its hotel guestrooms and meeting space in January for one of the most expensive hotel renovations in history.
The $400 million project, to last up to two years, will involve demolishing an existing north tower to make room for a larger guestroom structure, and increasing ballroom and meeting facilities.
The pending renovations and additions will boost the hotel’s guestroom count from its current 1,372 units to almost 1,750, including condos, more than twice the capacity of the next-largest area hotel, the Loews Miami Beach. But in the meantime it will take out of inventory a significant lodging source for Miami meetings.
“We’ll still have options down here for stand-alone groups, with the Loews and the Westin Diplomat,” said Rachelle Stone, partner with Advantage Destination & Meeting Services in North Miami Beach. “But I’ve heard rumblings from my peers who do a lot of city-wides that the closing will probably affect them.”
The Fontainebleau was acquired in January by local developer Turnberry Associates, which took management in-house. The Fontainebleau had been managed for 26 years by Hilton.
Its only lodging accommodations remaining open will be the 462 condos in the 36-story Fontainebleau Tower, opened earlier this year. An additional 286 condo units are set to open late next year.
The hotel, including the curving “Chateau” structure designed by Morris Lapidus in 1954 in what became known as the Art Moderne style, was the crown jewel of Miami Beach hospitality and entertainment long before the trendy street cafés and nightlife scene blossomed on South Beach in the 1990s.
Another Lapidus-designed property, the adjacent 349-room Eden Roc Renaissance, built in 1956, plans a renovation of its own beginning next summer. The facility will add a 15-story condo-hotel above a new garage and ballroom.
Both the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc plans are under review by the Miami Beach Planning Department under the city’s stringent historical preservation codes.
The designer for both hotels is Miami-based Nichols Brosch Sandoval, which designed the heralded Loews Miami Beach and the redevelopment of another Lapidus design, the 1953 Di Lido Hotel, relaunched in 2003 as the Ritz-Carlton South Beach.