Bal Harbour and Surfside · Miami

Fendi Chateau Residences

Fendi's first residential building anywhere in the world is twelve stories standing on 300 feet of Surfside sand. The county roll counts one fewer home than the brochure does, and we will show you both numbers.

The first one Fendi ever built, and a one-unit gap in the record

Fashion houses have been lending their names to towers for two decades. This was the first time Fendi actually built one. Fendi Chateau Residences, completed on the Surfside oceanfront and carried on the Miami-Dade roll under the subdivision name CHATEAU OCEAN CONDO with a year built of 2016, is the house's debut in residential architecture anywhere in the world, and the interiors were done by Fendi Casa rather than approved from a distance.

The roll and the sales material disagree by exactly one home. The county record carries 57 parcels. The developer publishes 58 residences. A single-unit gap is one of the most common discrepancies on any condominium folio, and it usually resolves into a bookkeeping difference rather than a mystery: two homes recorded as one parcel, or a residence folioed under a description that does not read as a residence. We note it rather than pretend to have settled it, and we would rather you heard it here than found it yourself on the appraiser's site.

Either way the arithmetic is the point. Fifty-seven or fifty-eight homes across twelve floors is fewer than five per floor in a building on the Atlantic. Most oceanfront towers of this height in Miami-Dade carry two or three times that.

Arquitectonica outside, Fendi Casa inside

Arquitectonica drew the building and ArquitectonicaGEO drew the ground it stands on, which matters more here than it usually does: the two pools sit in tropical gardens between the building and the sand, so the landscape is the transition rather than a border planting. The massing is deliberately low and wide for the site, twelve stories rather than the forty a developer could have argued for, with deep terraces cut into the east face.

Inside, Fendi Casa worked in collaboration with the Miami designer Fanny Haim. This is where the brand distinction is real. A licensing deal produces a logo on a door handle; this produced the millwork, the lobby, the amenity rooms and the finish palette, delivered as a coherent piece by the house's own furniture arm. Whether you want a building to read as a Fendi object is a matter of taste. That it genuinely is one is a matter of record.

Two pools, a thermal spa, and a restaurant that only residents use

The developer publishes 300 linear feet of private oceanfront. On a boutique building that number does something specific: with fewer than sixty homes behind it, the beach in front never has to work hard.

Two swimming pools sit in the gardens, separated rather than stacked, so the building has both a place to swim laps and a place to sit through an afternoon. The spa carries a European thermal pool alongside treatment rooms, which is a genuinely unusual inclusion at this scale and the reason wellness here is not just a fitness room with a towel service.

The best amenity may be the private restaurant. It is fitted with a full chef's kitchen and it is for residents, which means dinner downstairs is a real option rather than a room you book for a birthday. There is a fitness center and a media center as well, and services run to 24-hour concierge and valet.

The residences

Published sizes run from roughly 3,232 to about 6,726 square feet, in three and four bedroom layouts. There is no small plan in the building. That single decision explains most of what Fendi Chateau feels like from the inside.

Dedicated elevators open into private foyers, so no home shares a corridor with another. Terraces reach up to twelve feet deep, which is enough width to put a real table outside instead of a pair of chairs, and corner residences are published with full summer kitchens.

Frontage is east into the Atlantic. With twelve floors and fewer than five homes on each of them, the plans run wide rather than deep, and glass does most of the eastern wall.

Where it sits in Surfside

9349 Collins puts the building near the middle of Surfside's oceanfront run, which is the most walkable position on this stretch of the barrier island.

• The Surfside Community Center at 9301 Collins is directly alongside: oceanfront, public, with a lap pool, a plunge pool with a waterslide and a children's pool.
• Harding Avenue's commercial strip between roughly 94th and 96th is two to three blocks west, on foot: Cafe Ragazzi, Rustiko, Roast, Josh's Deli, Sushi Republic, Gifted Crust Bakery and a run of independent storefronts.
• Bal Harbour Shops at 9700 Collins is about a quarter mile north, across 96th Street. Neiman Marcus, Saks, Carpaccio, Makoto, and a roughly 200,000-square-foot expansion adding more than thirty stores now underway.
• The Surf Club Restaurant by Thomas Keller and Lido are a few blocks south at 9001 Collins.
• Haulover Park sits across the inlet bridge to the north: 177 acres, 1.4 miles of beach, and Bill Bird Marina with 152 gated wet slips for vessels to 120 feet, a fuel dock, all-hours ramps and charter and drift fishing fleets.

Surfside runs a free on-demand Freebee shuttle within town limits and Metrobus routes 120, S, E and H work Collins Avenue. The tolled Broad Causeway at 96th Street reaches the mainland at 123rd. Miami International is about 19 miles, commonly 35 to 45 minutes; Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood is 21 to 23 miles north, commonly 35 to 50. Both numbers move with traffic.

Who this building is for

It is for someone who has looked at the big oceanfront towers and quietly counted the elevators. Fewer than five homes per floor, private elevator entry, no plan under 3,000 square feet: this is a building that has decided how many people it wants to be, and the decision is unusual on the Atlantic.

It is for a buyer who wants the beach to be theirs in practice, not only in the deed. Three hundred feet of private frontage divided by fifty-odd homes is a ratio you can feel on a Saturday in March.

And it is for anyone who wants to walk to dinner. Harding Avenue is two blocks west, Bal Harbour Shops is a quarter mile north, and a private restaurant with its own chef's kitchen sits downstairs for the nights you would rather not leave the building at all.