(Bloomberg) – Miami’s “supertall” tower slated for 888 Brickell Ave. and managed by Major Food Group (MFG) has released detailed plans of its interiors and public spaces. It will be called Major.

The team’s 90-story tower behind New York’s Carbone and the Grill restaurants will have 259 apartments with prices ranging from $1.6 million to $11 million for a four-bedroom unit. Pricing for the penthouses has yet to be announced.

“It’s a premium product that will definitely fetch a premium,” says Michael Stern, CEO and founder of JDS Development Group, the company developing the building. “From an architectural point of view, it will be something very different from what you have seen before.”

The building, designed by Studio Sofield, will have a facade clad in ivory travertine and white stucco, with glossy black steel beams; at its peak, four massive sculptures inspired, according to the designer, by Italian Futurism.

Residences will be offered fully furnished, including plates and silverware, which will be chosen by MFG co-founder and chef Mario Carbone, who also designs the guestroom kitchens in conjunction with Studio Sofield. The apartments are designed in such a way that the owners have the possibility of closing off parts and renting them out as hotel suites.

“You can lock down a suite and put it in a hotel pool,” Stern says of opening up rooms for reservations. “You can have that flexibility and offset your ownership costs, or you can use the whole apartment.”

At any given time, he estimates, about 200 hotel suites will be available. “There are no dedicated hotel floors,” he explains. “The condo units represent the hotel pool.”

MFG will manage the hotel rooms. MFG co-founder Jeff Zalaznick said the company had been looking for the opportunity to open a hotel for years: “But did I think I would also sell branded apartments with this hotel?” He adds: “It seems like a natural evolution of our brand. We are going to offer a product that is unlike anything on the market.

Private Club

Part of that selling point is the Sofield-designed residences, which will include 24-hour room service from an MFG-run kitchen as well as the option to hire a kitchen chef to cook in apartments and hotel rooms. An even larger part, according to Stern and Zalaznick, are the building’s four restaurants, still unknown and managed by MFG, two of which will be inside a huge 120,000 square foot private club, designed by Ken Fulk and also managed by MFG. .

“It consists of about eight floors,” Stern explains. “It will have an indoor paddle court, swimming pool, large event space and two restaurants.” Zalaznick adds that there will also be a private boxing gym and a spa with cold and hot plunges, IV drips and infrared heating rooms – “a place where you work hard and play hard, and you never have from”.

Stern declines to specify how much membership will cost or how many foreign memberships will be available, but confirms that residents of the building will automatically be members. “Frankly,” he says, “we want to keep it exclusive, and we want to control access.”

Private clubs, he notes, are having a moment right now in Miami, personified by MFG’s ZZ’s “which has 2,000 members and a waiting list of 7,000 members,” Stern says. “But ZZ is a few thousand feet away. It will be over 100,000; there is nothing touching this scale.

The restaurants

The building will have four restaurants, each with interiors by designer Ken Fulk. The largest, a double-height space on the ground floor, will be open to the public. “We’re looking at creating a concept related to Carbone,” says Zalaznick, referring to the nostalgic big-ticket Italian-American restaurant with locations in New York, Las Vegas and Miami. “Probably not a pure Carbon,” he adds, “a Carbon steakhouse. Because a steakhouse is the most powerful thing you can have in a hotel or resort. Look at the giant Vegas properties, a steakhouse is always number one.

The other restaurant open to the public will be a cafe modeled after Sadelle’s, MFG’s high-end, upscale bagel shop that opened its first location in Manhattan’s SoHo in 2015 and has since expanded to Las Vegas and Dallas. “It will be an all-day coffee and breakfast venue, like the Beverly Hills Hotel Diner,” Zalaznick says. He says the ground floor will feature a store showcasing brands that MFG uses and supports, from MFG’s favorite cafe to clothing lines.

Inside the members’ club, a restaurant will offer a European-style indoor and outdoor rooftop experience, according to Zalaznick. “Big whole fish, nice pasta with clams, fresh pizzas, big platters of vegetables. Think Cinq en Cinq,” says Zalaznick, referring to the trendy beach club in the south of France. The second restaurant, located indoors, will be Chinese, a new concept for MFG.

The goal is to make residential and club spaces feel “sophisticated in downtown New York compared to a Miami pastiche,” says Stern. “Let’s take an example: What is the trendiest living room in New York right now? It’s Zero Bond. Who designed it? Bill Sofield” – who, Stern explains, “knows how to create that magic, that feeling and that spirit of a place.”

The word “placemaking,” Stern concludes, “is a corny word, but it’s intangible, and this guy gets it. We get the architecture part, and Major Food Group gets the lifestyle part.

Insatiable appetite

Major is expected to open in early 2026; sales of the building will be launched this fall. Right now, Miami’s real estate market is still booming, but sales of luxury homes on the East Coast are starting to slow, which could affect South Florida. The stock market decline shows no signs of abating and interest rates continue to rise.

While acknowledging the potential headwinds, Stern, who has four additional buildings in Miami that are either completed or under development, remains optimistic. “That slowdown, we haven’t really seen in South Florida,” he said. “You’ve seen it in other places, but Florida is so out of whack. There’s just no supply. We’ve run out of the product we have here, and we have a lot of tenants who don’t haven’t bought yet.”

To some extent, this is confirmed by sales data. In the first quarter, compared to the same period in 2021, closed sales increased 51%, prices increased 22.7% and inventory decreased 53.6% in the mainland coastal Miami, according to a report by Douglas Elliman. Condo sales in the area rose from the previous year’s figure for the seventh consecutive quarter, according to the report. In the Brickell district, where the Major tower will be located, supply has fallen by more than 80% since last year.

Yet relief is hardly imminent. Stern says the plan is to break ground in early 2023; if all goes well, the building will be completed by mid-2024. “People want it,” he says. “There’s an insatiable appetite in Miami, and the demand hasn’t diminished at all.”

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