Four Seasons Hotel Miami

The Four Seasons tower at 1435 Brickell Avenue was the tallest building in Florida when it topped out: 70 storeys and 789 feet, a glass and stone shaft by Handel Architects for Millennium Partners, finished in 2003. Four Seasons Hotel Miami occupies its lower floors, with offices above the hotel and private residences in the upper half, and a seventh-floor pool terrace of two acres that the hotel describes as the largest in the city.

History

Brickell Avenue was a street of banks and consulates when the project was announced in the late 1990s, and the tower was the first mixed-use high-rise on the avenue to put a hotel of this rank at its base. The hotel opened in October 2003. It held the Florida height record for 14 years, until the Panorama Tower a few blocks north overtook it in 2017. Four Seasons refurbished the hotel in 2016 with Tara Bernerd and Partners, who redid the lobby, bar, rooms and suites in a residential register. The Brickell City Centre development across the avenue, opened in 2016, turned the neighbourhood into a shopping and dining district around it.

Architecture and design

Handel's tower is a slender rectangle of blue-green glass and limestone, with the hotel entrance on Brickell and a porte-cochère under the podium. The seventh-floor podium roof is the hotel's signature: two acres of terrace with three pools, palms, gardens and cabanas, looking east over Biscayne Bay and the port. Bernerd's interiors use walnut, bronze and pale upholstery in the public rooms. The Equinox club, a 50,000-square-foot sports club on the podium, is shared with members and gives the hotel a gym far larger than a hotel would build for itself.

Rooms and suites

Rooms and suites occupy the floors immediately above the podium, with floor-to-ceiling windows towards the bay or the city and the skyline of downtown. Suites have separate living rooms and the larger ones a dining table. The residential finish of the 2016 refurbishment, with timber floors and loose furniture rather than fitted units, is what sets the rooms apart from the glass towers around them.

Dining

Edge Steak and Bar, on the seventh floor by the pool, is the hotel's main restaurant, a steakhouse run by the chef Aaron Brooks with a Florida slant: local fish, vegetables from the region's farms, and a terrace. The Bahia pool bar serves lunch and cocktails on the terrace, and the lobby bar takes the evening. Room service runs around the clock.

Wellness

The spa has treatment rooms on the podium level, next to Equinox's studios and weight rooms, which hotel guests may use. The three outdoor pools on the terrace are open year round, and the cabanas are let by the day.

Weddings and events

The hotel's ballroom and meeting rooms come with pre-function space and a boardroom, and the pool terrace is used for cocktail receptions and wedding ceremonies with the bay behind. Weddings in Miami are an industry and the Four Seasons takes the city ones, as against the beach ones at its sister property, the Surf Club in Surfside. Corporate groups come for the proximity to the banks.

Location

Brickell is the financial district of Miami, south of the Miami River and downtown, and the hotel is in the middle of it, with Brickell City Centre and Mary Brickell Village within a few blocks. The Brickell Metrorail and Metromover stations are a short walk. PortMiami, for the cruise ships, is about ten minutes by car, Miami International Airport about 20, and South Beach across the causeway about 20. It is the luxury hotel in Miami for anyone whose business is on the mainland.