Downtown and Worldcenter · Miami

Paramount Miami Worldcenter

Most towers publish an amenity list. Paramount publishes a sports complex — two tennis courts, a soccer pitch, an indoor basketball court and 26 cabanas, sitting on top of the first condominium delivered inside Miami Worldcenter.

The deck is the argument

Every tower in Downtown Miami will show you a pool and a gym. Paramount opens the drawing and shows you a soccer pitch.

The building publishes an elevated amenity level running to roughly six acres of programmed space, and the inventory on it is not the usual set. Two outdoor tennis courts. A full outdoor soccer pitch. An indoor basketball court, under cover, which is a meaningful distinction in August. A boxing studio. A golf simulator. A resort pool deck with 26 poolside cabanas, plus additional pools, bungalows and planted gardens, walking paths, a dog park and a children's playground. Downstairs there is a spa and salon with treatment rooms, a fitness centre spread across more than one level, a game room, a kids' playroom and an on-site food market.

The developer also publishes a rooftop observatory and a 'skyport' — announced as a landing area for the flying cars the developer expected to arrive, and one of the most-discussed features of any Miami condominium of its generation. We flag it as the developer's own claim, because that is what it is, and because it is genuinely part of how this building was conceived and sold.

Take the skyport out of it and the deck still stands up. Very few residential buildings anywhere in Florida can offer a tennis match, a five-a-side game and a shooting session indoors on the same afternoon without leaving the property.

567 or 569

The Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser records the building as PARAMOUNT MIAMI WORLDCENTER CONDO, year built 2019, carrying 567 residential folios. The developer publishes 569 residences. We give you both.

A two-unit gap of this kind is ordinary. Combinations at closing, a duplex counted once on the roll and twice in a brochure, or a unit reclassified during recording will all produce it. Neither number is wrong; they are answering slightly different questions. What both agree on is scale: sixty storeys, 700 feet, and something in the region of 9.5 homes per floor. This is a big building, and it is designed to work like one.

The county's 2019 date matches the record too. The tower topped out in August 2018 and received a temporary certificate of occupancy in July 2019 for units through the 38th floor, making it the first condominium to deliver inside Miami Worldcenter.

First through the door at Worldcenter

Paramount did not arrive next to Miami Worldcenter. It arrived inside it, before the district existed in any finished form, and it is the reason a great deal of what surrounds it now got built.

Elkus Manfredi Architects — a Boston practice with a long record in large mixed-use districts — drew a tower that reads as one clean shaft with a landscaped crown rather than a decorated object. The 700-foot height and the 60-storey count put it among the taller residential buildings in the city. IDDI handled the interiors and DS Boca the landscape. The development was announced at around $500 million, with ground broken in March 2016.

What that early position bought owners is unusual: the retail did not have to be walked to, it was constructed at the base of the neighbourhood they already lived in. Worldcenter's 300,000 square feet of street-level shops and restaurants now wrap the surrounding blocks, arranged around World Square, a 20,000-square-foot public plaza. Very few buyers get to watch a district assemble itself around a building they already own.

The residences

The floor plans run wide. Homes start around 1,018 square feet plus terrace and climb to roughly 4,375 square feet in the four-bedroom duplexes, with one-bedroom layouts from about 937 to 1,422 square feet and three-bedroom plans between roughly 1,753 and 2,320. That range is the point — the same building holds a working city apartment and a family-scale home.

Ceilings are ten feet, which is a full foot above the market's default and immediately obvious the moment you walk in. Residences are entered from private elevator landings. Floor-to-ceiling glass and deep terraces run the perimeter, and the flow-through plans on the east side pick up Biscayne Bay, PortMiami and the beaches beyond; the west side gets the river, the skyline and the sunset behind it.

Because the tower sits west of Biscayne Boulevard rather than on it, the water is a view rather than a frontage. Be clear-eyed about that. From the higher floors it is a very good view, uninterrupted across the low-rise blocks between here and the bay, and you are buying it at a Downtown position rather than a waterfront one.

The neighbourhood

The building's front door opens into the most concentrated retail and dining block Downtown has ever had. Within a few minutes on foot: Apple, Sephora, Lululemon, Ray-Ban, Free People, Savage X Fenty, Posman Books and Lucky Strike Bowling, with Maple & Ash, Brasserie Laurel, Earls Kitchen + Bar, Sixty Vines, Sweet Paris and El Vecino open, and Serafina and Juvia announced. Kaseya Center is at 601 Biscayne Boulevard and the Freedom Tower at 600. Club Space at 34 NE 11th Street and E11EVEN at 29 NE 11th Street anchor the Park West nightlife block a couple of streets north.

Keep walking east and you reach Bayside Marketplace at 401 Biscayne with roughly 100 waterfront shops and restaurants, Bayfront Park's 32 acres at 301 Biscayne — Isamu Noguchi's redesign, with an amphitheatre, rock garden, dog park and a fountain of more than 800 synchronised jets — and Miamarina at Bayside, 125 wet slips for vessels from 55 to 230 feet with fuel, pump-out and customs clearing. North along Biscayne are Maurice A. Ferre Park, the Perez Art Museum Miami at 1103 Biscayne, Frost Science at 1101 and the Adrienne Arsht Center at 1300.

Transport is the quiet advantage of this exact address. Brightline's MiamiCentral at 600 NW 1st Avenue is a short walk west, running to Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and Orlando, with Tri-Rail terminating there. The free Metromover covers 21 stations over 4.4 miles from 5 a.m. to midnight and interchanges with Metrorail at Government Center. There is a Whole Foods Market in the Central Business District and a Publix at Brickell City Centre one Metromover ride south.

By car: Miami International is about 7 miles west, typically 15 to 25 minutes via SR-836. Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood is about 28 miles north, 35 to 50 minutes on I-95. South Beach is over the MacArthur Causeway, the Design District about ten minutes up Biscayne, and PortMiami is reached by Port Boulevard. The Miami River's restaurant row — Seaspice at 422 NW North River Drive, Kiki on the River at 450, Garcia's Seafood Grille at 398 — is a short drive southwest.

Who it suits

Paramount answers a different question from the trophy towers a few blocks north, and it answers it well.

• Anyone living here full time. The amenity deck is the reason. If you actually want to play tennis on a Wednesday evening, shoot baskets indoors when it is 94 degrees, or take a class without booking a club membership across town, this building is built for that pattern of life in a way very few others are.
• Anyone weighing income. Scale, a broad range of layouts from one bedroom upward, ten-foot ceilings, private elevator entry and a retail district at street level make this a straightforward proposition to let annually.
• Anyone shopping on value per square foot. Ten-foot ceilings, an amenity inventory this deep and a Worldcenter address, at a Downtown position rather than a waterfront one, is a rational trade and a lot of buyers make it deliberately.
• Anyone who travels by train as much as by plane. Brightline at MiamiCentral is a walk, not a drive, and that changes what a weekend in Orlando or West Palm Beach costs you.

If direct water frontage or a signature-architect envelope is what you are chasing, we would steer you elsewhere in this market and tell you why. If you want the deepest amenity programme Downtown has, inside the retail district rather than a walk from it, this is the building. Call and we will show you the deck first — it makes the argument better than any floor plan does.