Fontainebleau undergoes $500M makeover

The pickiest visitor won’t feel cramped inside the hotel’s rooms, since they’ve been stripped to their steel studs. Don’t look for the signature bow-tie floor in the hotel’s sweeping lobby. Plywood covers the black-and-white tiles; bare concrete forms the rest.

Even at its most dated and faded moment, the 1954 resort never looked this bad. But with his $500 million bet on South Florida’s largest hotel, developer Jeffrey Soffer is doing his best to start from scratch.

”Everything’s brand new, from the plumbing to the drywall,” the 39-year-old real estate heir said during a tour of the gutted ground floor of the hotel. “The only thing you have here in this hotel that’s old is the concrete.”

With 70 percent of the resort closed since last spring, its main pool deck about to be torn down, and the Fontainebleau sitting out a time of record room rates for South Florida hotels, Soffer has gone close to all-in when it comes to the Fontainebleau.

After recruiting prominent Las Vegas hotelier Glenn Schaeffer as a partner and operations chief, Soffer plans a string of Fontainebleaus from Miami Beach to Vietnam in hopes the legendary name can regain its lost luster and attract a new generation of high-rolling vacationers.

Along with a complete redo of the hotel’s main 876 rooms — 825 in the new layout — Soffer is replacing the faux rocks and Cookie the Octopus from the Fontainebleau’s pool deck with a network of edgeless pools, cabanas and gardens designed to reflect the hotel’s new luxurious look (and luxurious rates, which Soffer expects to increase 70 percent to more than $300 for the average night).

With an estimated 1,500 rooms — final inventory will depend on condo-hotel owners renting their units — the resort set to reopen next summer will easily rank as the largest in South Florida. And if some of the sleek finishes of the new designs evoke more Ian Schrager than Morris Lapidus, Fontainebleau executives don’t seem to mind the comparison.

”This is definitely going to have a huge South Beach feel,” said David Feder, the general manager Soffer hired away from West Palm Beach’s PGA National Resort in July.

Guests will have 11 restaurants and bars to choose from, including a two-story steak house replacing the hotel’s main dining room, a sushi bar and dim sum spot, and an oceanfront Italian bistro. Pure, the nightclub at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, will take over the space where Club Tropigala used to bring in Latin dance revues. Plans show a glass-encased spa with 40,000 square feet of treatment rooms and facilities.

”There’s nothing like it on Miami Beach,” said Soffer, whose father, Don, developed Aventura in the 1970s and built Turnberry Isle resort there. “It’s going to have that mystique of what it was in the ’50s.”

That Soffer has to reach back to the Eisenhower administration to recall the Fontainebleau’s glory days captures some of the challenges he faces in the midst of his nearly $500 million renovation.

Though once a favorite retreat for Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball (not to mention James Bond in Goldfinger), the hotel designed by famed architect Morris Lapidus lost its luster in the 1970s.

Even after Steve Muss, who bought the Fontainebleau out of bankruptcy in 1978, expanded the ballroom space and renovated the property, the resort trailed the pack.

But with modern rooms, an elaborate poolscape and a bevy of fine-dining options, Soffer and Schaeffer see the Fontainebleau functioning as a self-contained vacation spot.

Initial plans called for demolishing the Fontainebleau’s 17-story ”Spite Wall” building, named for its looming presence over the pool of its next-door rival, the Eden Roc. The comma-shaped Chateau building, considered a signature Lapidus creation, was off-limits because of a deal Muss made with city officials. But Soffer announced plans to replace the nearly windowless Spite Wall with an angular glass tower that included a rooftop pool jutting off the 20th floor like a horn.

But the Spite Wall ended up outlasting Soffer and Schaeffer’s bold strategy.

By Douglas Hanks

Courtesy of  MiamiHerald.com