Brickell · Miami

Brickell Flatiron

The name is not a metaphor. The lot is a true triangle where South Miami Avenue forks from SE 1st Avenue, and the 64-storey tower was built over a public street and a live Metromover guideway.

A wedge, a street, and a train underneath

South Miami Avenue and Southeast 1st Avenue diverge here, and the ground left between them is a true triangle — the same geometry that produced Manhattan's Flatiron, applied at 64 storeys instead of 22. Most developers would have squared the plan and lost the point. This one did the opposite.

Revuelta Architecture International let the floor plate follow the wedge and curved the walls to soften the apex, so the tower reads as a lens from the north and a blade from the side. The practical payoff is that a triangular plate hands out corners generously: far more residences here get two exposures than the unit count would suggest. At 736 feet it stood among Miami's tallest on completion, and the top of it is not a mechanical crown — it is the amenity floor.

The site carried two further complications. The tower was built over Southeast 11th Street and over the Metromover's elevated guideway, which still runs through the block. Constructing above a live transit structure and a public right-of-way is a problem most people solve by buying a different lot; CMC Group solved it by redesigning the scheme onto the larger of the two original parcels and bridging the rest.

Ugo Colombo developed it through CMC Group with Capital Group. Massimo Iosa Ghini, of Iosa Ghini Associati in Bologna, drew the interiors and the amenity spaces, and the Italian stone house Margraf supplied marble for the project. The building's own art programme, revealed by the developer in 2020, includes Julian Schnabel's cast-and-plate-bronze Sawtooth Lamps of 2014, paintings by Carlo Battaglia and Marco Glaviano's photographs of Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins, hung through the lobby and the public rooms.

527 on the roll, and the numbers that disagree

On the year, the Miami-Dade roll and the developer agree exactly. Every folio at 1000 Brickell Plaza carries 2019 as year built, and the developer's temporary certificate of occupancy came in October 2019. That is a cleaner match than this site usually finds.

On the count, they do not. Search the address on the Property Appraiser and 528 records come back: one reference-only parent folio, 01-4139-164-0001, plus 527 active residential folios, each recorded under the subdivision name BRICKELL FLATIRON CONDO with a DOR code of RESIDENTIAL — CONDOMINIUM. So the county counts 527 homes, one at a time. Wikipedia and brickell.com publish 527 as well. Miamicondoinvestments publishes 523. Sales material over the years has carried 549.

The roll figure is the one that governs assessments and the one that was arrived at by counting; the others are worth knowing so you recognise them when they turn up in a listing. The folios carry a second useful signal too. The lowest residential records on the roll are townhome-style units numbered TH1801 and TH1802 — the living starts on the 18th floor, and everything below it is garage, retail and amenity. Spread across floors 18 to 64, 527 residences work out closer to eleven a floor than eight.

The pool is the roof

Not a plunge pool tucked onto a setback. The 64th floor — the actual top of a 736-foot building — carries the swimming pool, a hot tub and cabanas, alongside a 6,300-square-foot fitness centre and a full spa with separate steam rooms, sauna and locker suites. Miami has a great many rooftop decks. Very few of them are the roof.

The second amenity floor sits at 17 and 18 and takes the daily load: a resort-scale lap pool, a children's pool and playroom, a screening room, event space, a billiards room, a cigar room and a wine room with cellar. Splitting the programme this way matters more than it sounds. The lap swim at seven in the morning and the party on Saturday night never have to share a deck.

Ground level adds roughly 24,800 square feet of retail and restaurant space wrapping the plaza, so the building's own street frontage is part of the amenity. Inside there is a business centre and conference rooms, private storage, bicycle parking and electric-vehicle charging in the garage. Service is a full-time doorman, 24-hour concierge, 24-hour valet and security.

Inside the residences

Tower residences run one to three bedrooms across roughly 737 to 2,025 square feet. The penthouse levels go two to five bedrooms and 1,350 to 6,487 square feet. Every home has a balcony, and the curved plate means a surprising number have two exposures.

Ceilings tell you where you are in the stack. Nine feet six inches through the tower, ten feet six inches through the penthouse levels, and up to 22 feet in the upper penthouses — at that height the volume is genuinely double, not merely tall, and a mezzanine reads as architecture rather than a shelf. Glass is floor-to-ceiling and energy-efficient in specification.

Iosa Ghini's hand is clearest in the shared rooms: a Bolognese designer's reading of Miami, which means curve, stone and restraint rather than mirror and gilt. It has aged better than most 2019 interiors in this city, largely because it never chased the moment.

Two blocks from everything

Score Brickell purely on what you can reach without a car and 1000 Brickell Plaza is hard to beat anywhere in Florida. The Metromover's Eighth Street station is a block away and free, and the guideway runs through the building's own block. Metrorail's Brickell station, at SW 1st Avenue and SW 10th Street, is a short walk and runs direct to Miami International.

Brickell City Centre is two blocks north at 701 South Miami Avenue — about nine acres and five storeys of open-air retail under the Climate Ribbon, 150,000 square feet of fabric-wrapped steel blades engineered by Hugh Dutton Associates to move air and collect an estimated three million gallons of rainwater a year into above-ground cisterns. Mary Brickell Village is a block south at 901. Komodo is at 801 Brickell Avenue. Across the Brickell Avenue bridge, Zuma and the Kimpton EPIC sit on the downtown riverfront at 270 Biscayne Boulevard Way.

For green: Simpson Park Hammock, 7.8 acres of hardwood hammock protected since 1913, is southwest at 55 SW 17th Road, and the Underline's Brickell Backyard runs beneath the Metrorail from the Miami River to SW 13th Street. The Miami Circle National Historic Landmark sits on the river's south bank at 401 Brickell Avenue.

Walk Score puts Brickell Avenue at 99 for walking, 96 for transit and 75 for biking; from this corner those numbers are earned rather than aspirational. Miami International is about seven miles by SR-836, usually 15 to 25 minutes. Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood is about 28 miles up I-95, usually 35 to 55. Brightline's MiamiCentral is roughly a mile and a half north.

Who it suits

Anyone who wants to live in Brickell rather than look at it. The Metromover station is a block away, the Metrorail is a short walk, two of the neighbourhood's three retail anchors are within two blocks and the third is across a bridge. Cars become optional here in a way they rarely are in South Florida.

It suits a full-time residence better than a seasonal one, and it suits an income buyer well: 527 folios across a wide spread of one-, two- and three-bedroom plans give a landlord real depth of comparable stock and a location that rents itself. On price per square foot it reads differently from the bayfront towers three blocks east, because it is not on the water and does not pretend to be.

Choose it for the roof, the transit and the triangle. If your requirement is a dock, a beach or a seawall, this is the wrong tower and the honest answer is to look east.