The Mandarin Oriental is coming back to Brickell Key. Swire Properties has started construction on the two towers that replace the old hotel at the tip of the island, and the centerpiece is a new 121-room Mandarin Oriental that the developer and the hotel group are billing as the brand's flagship for all of North America. The target for completion is 2030.

From implosion to groundbreaking in under six months

For a quarter century, the Mandarin was the place Miami went for the big occasion: a waterfront table at La Mar or Azul, a spa day, a wedding with the skyline behind it. The hotel opened in 2000 and came down in a controlled implosion this spring that took less than a minute. Swire announced on October 1 that construction on the replacement is officially underway, less than six months after the old building fell.

The site at the southern end of Brickell Key is not getting one building back but two, both designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, the New York architects behind some of the tallest towers in the world.

  • The North Tower rises 33 stories and holds the new hotel, 70 private condos and 28 Hotel Collection residences, which are fully furnished homes run with hotel services.
  • The South Tower rises 66 stories with 228 residences and no hotel at all.

What comes back for everyone else

The part of this that matters to most South Floridians is the hotel, because that is the part you can walk into. Swire's plans give the new Mandarin its own signature spa and waterfront dining, the same two things that made the original a destination for people who never booked a room there. The restaurants have not been named yet, and neither has the chef, so whether La Mar or anything like it returns is still an open question.

At 121 rooms, the hotel is built for a small, high-end crowd, with the residences doing most of the work of filling the towers. Interiors in the North Tower are by the designer Laura Gonzalez and in the South Tower by Tristan Auer, both on Architectural Digest's AD100 list, and the grounds are by SHMA, a landscape architecture studio based in Thailand.

The money behind it

Swire says it has already sold more than $1.7 billion worth of homes in the two towers before a single floor has gone up. The South Tower is 80 percent spoken for, and the North Tower, whose sales gallery opened in May, is about a quarter sold. Earlier this year the project's two crown penthouses went for $49.9 million each, which Swire says set records for a condo sale on mainland Miami. What remains starts at $4 million in the North Tower and $7 million in the South.

For the developer, it is the largest luxury residential project it has ever built and its first anywhere carrying a hotel brand's name. Swire has been headquartered in Miami since 1979. It developed Brickell Key and, more recently, Brickell City Centre.

The wait

Brickell Key is a 44-acre island, and for the next few years its southern tip will be a construction site. Then, around 2030, the island gets back what it lost: a five-star hotel with a spa and a dining room on the water, the kind of place Miami saves for a birthday, an anniversary or a Tuesday when someone in from out of town needs to be impressed. The old Mandarin had a long run. Its replacement now has a start date.