Bal Harbour and Surfside · Miami

The St. Regis Bal Harbour Resort & Residences

Three glass towers on 9.5 acres and 600 feet of Atlantic sand, one crosswalk from Bal Harbour Shops. The county records two separate condominiums here; the brochures record one resort. Both are correct.

One resort, two condominiums, and a year that depends on who you ask

Stand on the sand and the St. Regis reads as a single object: three 27-storey glass towers set in a row on 9.5 acres, sharing 600 feet of Atlantic frontage and one porte-cochère. The Miami-Dade County record disagrees. The South tower at 9701 Collins and the North tower at 9705 are recorded together as BAL HARBOUR NORTH SOUTH CONDO, carrying 95 and 107 parcels respectively. The Center tower at 9703 is a separate condominium entirely — BAL HARBOUR CENTER CONDO — and the roll holds 285 parcels there against the 267 residences the marketing material usually publishes. Both figures are worth knowing before you make an offer, and the gap between them is the ordinary consequence of hotel keys, cabanas and storage units being deeded as parcels in their own right.

The dates diverge the same way. The county roll assigns a year built of 2011 to all three towers. The resort opened its doors to guests on 19 January 2012, and virtually every brochure prints 2012 for that reason. Neither is wrong; they are measuring different moments. If you are underwriting a building, use 2011. If you are telling the story at dinner, 2012 is the year the lights came on.

What stood here before is not in dispute. The Village of Bal Harbour's own history records that the 645-room Sheraton Bal Harbour — opened in 1956 as the Hotel Americana, and for four decades the loudest address on this stretch of Collins — was demolished in 2007 to clear the ground for the St. Regis. Almost nothing on the barrier island gets a redevelopment site of this width. That single fact explains more about the building than any amenity list: the towers could be spread, spaced and turned to the water because there was room to do it.

The resort side of the door

The advantage of living inside a working hotel is that the amenities are staffed at seven in the morning on a Tuesday, not just for the sales tour. The property publishes a Rémede Spa of 14,000 square feet with twelve treatment rooms, steam and sauna, plunge pools and an Athletic Club running a daily class schedule. Two ocean-view pools sit between the towers and the sand — a resort pool where the noise is, and a separate adults' tranquility pool where it is not. That division sounds small until you have spent a February afternoon on the wrong side of it.

Dining is on site and published by the property as BH Prime, Atlantikós and La Gourmandise — a steakhouse, a Greek room and a patisserie, which between them cover most of what anyone actually wants without moving a car. Add roughly 13,000 square feet of indoor function space, the Astor Ballroom among it, capable of seating up to 500. The resort also runs the Sea Turtle Club for children.

The service layer is where the address separates itself. The St. Regis butler programme runs 24 hours; so do the concierge and in-residence dining. The property publishes a house car, valet, pre-arrival provisioning, laundry and dry cleaning, pet and childcare arrangements, and — the detail that tells you exactly where you are — bag pick-up from Bal Harbour Shops, so that what you bought across the street arrives at your door before you do.

The residences

Floor plans run from roughly 1,600 square feet to just under 6,900 across the three towers, in two- to five-bedroom layouts, with a set of smaller one- and two-bedroom plans in the Center tower's condominium-hotel inventory. Terraces are deep — eleven feet in many plans — and glass runs floor to ceiling on the ocean side. Several plans arrive by private elevator foyer.

Yabu Pushelberg's hand is the thing to look for on a walkthrough. The firm handled the hotel and the residences together, so the vocabulary carries: stone laid in wide, quiet fields rather than pattern, warm timber against cool marble, lighting that is recessed and low rather than crystalline. It has aged better than most 2011 interiors in this market precisely because it never chased a moment.

Orientation matters here more than square footage. The three towers are staggered on the site, so direct ocean exposure, oblique ocean exposure and the western Intracoastal-and-skyline view are three genuinely different products at three genuinely different prices. Walk more than one before deciding which one you are buying.

Bal Harbour, from the front door

Bal Harbour Village is 0.6 square miles on paper, roughly half of it water, incorporated in 1946 and running from 96th Street north to Baker's Haulover Inlet. Collins Avenue is the only north-south spine, which sounds limiting and in practice is the opposite: the whole village is walkable end to end in about twenty minutes.

Bal Harbour Shops sits at 9700 Collins, directly across the street. Open-air, built by the Whitman family in 1965, Neiman Marcus since 1971 and Saks since 1976, with Carpaccio, Makoto, China Grill, Slim's and Carrie's inside it; a roughly 200,000-square-foot expansion adding more than thirty stores is underway. The Village maintains a mile-long beach path under the sea grapes with separate lanes for bicycles and pedestrians, and it begins essentially at the property line.

North across the inlet bridge, Haulover Park runs 177 acres with 1.4 miles of beach and Bill Bird Marina — 152 gated wet slips for vessels to 120 feet, a fuel dock, ramps open around the clock, and charter and drift fleets. South across 96th Street, Surfside's Harding Avenue offers three low-rise blocks of independent storefronts and cafés, and The Surf Club Restaurant by Thomas Keller is a short drive further down Collins.

Getting out: Bal Harbour runs a free on-demand Freebee shuttle within the village, Metrobus routes 120, S, E and H work Collins, and there is a Citi Bike station at the 96th Street beach access. The tolled Broad Causeway at 96th crosses to Bay Harbor Islands and lands on 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 suits the owner who is here for six weeks in the winter and wants the apartment to run itself for the other forty-six. Lock the door, hand it to the staff, and the building keeps operating around it — that is the whole proposition of buying inside a hotel, and this is the largest branded-residence complex in the market by some distance.

It suits anyone who entertains at a scale that ordinary condominiums cannot absorb. A twelve-person dinner is a phone call; a 200-person event is a ballroom booking rather than a logistical crisis.

And it suits the buyer who treats the spa as infrastructure rather than decoration. Fourteen thousand square feet with twelve treatment rooms is not a wellness suite bolted onto a lobby; it is a facility that happens to sit under your apartment.

Buyers looking at the Center tower's condominium-hotel inventory should note that it is a different instrument from the South and North residences — a different condominium on the county roll, with a different use pattern and a different set of documents. Worth understanding early. Call and I will walk you through which of the three towers actually matches what you are trying to do.