Brickell · Miami

SLS LUX Brickell

Two propositions share one tower at 801 South Miami Avenue: 438 condominium residences and 83 condo-hotel suites, stacked 58 storeys. The hotel half is why the service works — and why the county files it under a different name.

One building, two front desks

Most branded towers licence a name and hope nobody checks. SLS LUX did the structurally harder thing and built a hotel into the condominium. The published mix is 438 condominium residences plus 83 condo-hotel suites — 521 doors inside one 58-storey Arquitectonica tower, with the hotel component operated on site rather than implied in a brochure.

That matters more than it sounds. The suites are what pay for a staffed lobby at three in the morning, a kitchen that can send dinner to the 44th floor, and a housekeeping department that exists whether or not you are in residence. Buy into a tower without a hotel and you buy a concierge desk. Buy here and you buy a back of house.

The county record tells its own version of the same building. The Miami-Dade Property Appraiser carries the condominium as 801 SMA RESIDENCES CONDO at 801 S Miami Avenue, year built 2018 — the legal name on the deed is not the name over the door. That is ordinary for branded projects and still worth knowing before you sit down at a closing. The roll also shows 523 folios at the address against the published 521 units. Two folios of daylight, the kind of gap that usually resolves into commercial or reference parcels rather than mystery apartments. We print both numbers rather than choose one.

Published sources vary elsewhere too: contemporary press coverage of the 2018 opening put the tower at 57 storeys with 450 condominiums and 70 guestrooms. Where the developer's own mix and the press disagree, ask for the declaration.

Three pools, and a floor you will actually use

The amenities are split between a garden level and a roof, which is the right way round. Two pools sit on the LUX Garden Level with cabanas and lounge terraces. A third is published on the penthouse level with spas and a summer kitchen. On 57 there is a residents' sundeck, high enough that the bay, the river mouth and the whole grid of Brickell arrive at once.

Below that: a full-service spa, a fitness centre the developer publishes with an Equinox membership attached, a tennis court, and a multi-use sports level with courts for basketball, bocce and paddle. There is a two-storey lounge with a wine room and billiards, and indoor and outdoor play space. For an interior Brickell block with no water frontage to trade on, the inventory is unusually deep — this is not a gym and a pool with a rendering of a spa.

Dining is the part that changes an ordinary Tuesday. Katsuya takes the ground floor as a room of roughly 180 seats, SBar sits alongside at about 85, and in-residence dining runs off the hotel kitchen. The published art programme puts a Fernando Botero in the public rooms, an exterior mural by Fabian Burgos, and an LED façade work by Ana Isabel Martinez — commissioned pieces, not hotel-grade decoration bought by the metre.

The residences

Private elevator entry to each residence is the single most reliable luxury in a tall building, because it deletes the corridor. Ceilings are published at nine to ten feet through the living spaces and twelve in the penthouse residences. Kitchens arrive with Sub-Zero refrigeration and Wolf ovens; primary baths take rain showers and stone; smart-home control is standard throughout.

The floor plates run wide, so the plans favour corner glass and long terraces over deep interior rooms. West-facing residences take the city and the sunset going down over the Everglades. East faces the bay, and above the low-rise river blocks you get the causeways running out to Key Biscayne.

The condo-hotel suites are a genuinely separate purchase and should be read that way. They are furnished, published as eligible for the hotel's rental programme, and governed by their own documents — different carrying costs, different rules, different use. A buyer in Miami six weeks a year should read both sets before deciding which side of the building they belong on, and the answer is not always the obvious one.

Across the street from the shortest walk in Miami

801 South Miami Avenue faces Brickell City Centre at 701 — Swire's five-storey open-air centre across roughly nine acres, shaded by the Climate Ribbon, 150,000 square feet of fabric-wrapped steel blades engineered by Hugh Dutton Associates to channel breezes through the corridors and drop an estimated three million gallons of rainwater a year into above-ground cisterns. You cross one street. The Metromover's Eighth Street station connects directly into it.

Mary Brickell Village is two blocks south at 901 South Miami Avenue, with street-level restaurants and bars. Komodo is at 801 Brickell Avenue. Over the Brickell Avenue bridge, Zuma and the Kimpton EPIC hold the downtown riverfront at 270 Biscayne Boulevard Way, and the Mandarin Oriental sits out on Brickell Key at 500 Brickell Key Drive. Walk Score rates Brickell Avenue 99 for walking and 96 for transit; this address is a large part of why those numbers read the way they do.

Green space is closer than people expect. Simpson Park Hammock at 55 SW 17th Road preserves 7.8 acres of Brickell Hammock — tropical hardwood forest first set aside in 1913, sitting on the Miami Rock Ridge above 15 feet of elevation. The Underline's first phase, Brickell Backyard, opened in February 2021: a half-mile of trail, flex court, outdoor gym and gardens beneath the Metrorail from the river to SW 13th Street, the opening leg of a planned ten-mile linear park.

Metrorail's Brickell station at SW 1st Avenue and SW 10th Street runs direct to Miami International, which is about seven miles away and typically 15 to 25 minutes by car via SR-836. Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International is roughly 28 miles north on I-95, usually 35 to 55 minutes.

Who it is for

The strongest case here is the owner who is not always here. Lock the door, fly out, and the hotel keeps running underneath the apartment. That is a materially different kind of absence from a tower where the amenity deck goes quiet in August and the front desk shrinks to one person and a clipboard.

It also suits the buyer who entertains constantly and would rather not host. Katsuya downstairs, SBar for the part before, a wine room and a two-storey lounge for the part that runs late — and nobody has to see your kitchen.

What it is not is waterfront. No seawall, no marina, no beach. The bay here is a view from a high floor and a short drive to the Rickenbacker, not something you step out onto. If the water is the point, look to the bayfront blocks further south. If the city is the point — the shops, the restaurants, the Metromover, the ability to live in Miami without touching a car for days — very little in Florida is better positioned than this corner.