Inside Fouquet's Miami: 40,000 Square Feet of Paris, No Flash Required

Every luxury tower in Miami now advertises its amenities in acres, and the numbers have started to blur together. Fifty thousand square feet here, a private beach club there, a bowling alley somewhere else. So it is worth pausing on the first look inside Fouquet's Residences in the Miami Design District, not because 40,000 square feet is the biggest number in town, but because of who arranged them: RDAI, the Paris architecture studio that designs Hermès stores around the world. When the people responsible for the most disciplined retail spaces in fashion turn their attention to a residential amenity floor, the result is not more. It is calmer.

All photos courtest of RDAI

The renderings, released for the first time this week, show the restraint immediately. Warm woods instead of white gloss. Soft green tiles instead of neon. Sculptural furniture, lush planting, rooms that read as Parisian salons rather than South Beach spectacle. The program itself is complete in the way you would expect at this level: a rooftop pool with its own bar and a rooftop lounge beside it, a spa with a hammam and cold plunge, a fitness center with a private training studio, a golf simulator, an entertaining suite, an executive lounge, a playroom, and a salon set up for on-demand services. The most telling space may be the Serenity Lounge, a quiet room with a juice bar, which is the sort of amenity you design when you assume your residents are already overstimulated by Miami and would like somewhere to land.

But the genuine luxury at Fouquet's is not any single room. It is the door at the end of the corridor. The residences, 143 of them starting at $1.8 million, connect directly to the new 85-key Fouquet's hotel, which means owners live with five dining concepts downstairs and a hotel's full machinery on call: housekeeping, pantry stocking, event planning, a chauffeur when you want one, and a concierge desk that answers at 3 a.m. This is the world's first Fouquet's residential project, and the brand has clearly decided that the hotel is the amenity program's anchor tenant. The 40,000 square feet upstairs are the private layer; the hotel below is the service engine that makes them feel effortless rather than merely large.

There is a wager embedded in all this. Miami's amenity race has been an arms race, each tower promising a more extravagant inventory than the last, and Fouquet's is betting that the wealthiest buyers in the Design District, a neighborhood that sells art and fashion at the highest level, would rather have taste than tonnage. A hammam finished like a Hermès boutique is a flex, but it is a quiet one. Whether quiet wins is an open question in this market. On the evidence of these renderings, it at least looks better than the alternative.

Have a listing you think should be featured contact us or submit here to tell us more! Follow Off The MRKT on Twitter and Instagram, and like us on Facebook.