MIAMI — With a construction worker’s hard hat tipped to a jaunty angle on his bald head, the developer Craig Robins marched toward a cavernous three-story space, raw with dusty building materials and cables poking from unfinished walls.
“This is going to be Valentino,” Mr. Robins, 51, said in
October in the Miami Design District, once a sleepy swath of
furniture stores in a less-than-desirable part of town that Mr. Robins and his
partners are transforming into a large concentration of luxury shops.
Louis Vuitton’s flagship store will stand just north of
Valentino, and Van Cleef & Arpels to the south. Facing them will be Bulgari
and Christian Dior. About 20 top-drawer brands are to open in the district this
month, in individual buildings along spotless walkways and streets, in the
manner of Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, Fla., and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills,
Calif.
Another 30 or so are planned for the first half of 2015.
And by the end of 2016, Mr. Robins plans to have about 120 high-end tenants in
a 10-square-block radius, alongside restaurants, galleries, a boutique hotel,
sculptures, murals and 300 new trees, some perched on roofs. “We’re not a mall,
we’re a neighborhood,” Mr. Robins said in a thinly veiled jab at Bal Harbour Shops.
For decades, Bal Harbour was the only shopping center in
the Miami area where customers were assured a wide choice of luxury goods. Now,
it has lost some of retail’s choicest names, like Louis Vuitton, Hermès,
Cartier, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy and several others, to the Design District.
In Miami and its environs, a thumping economy is
continuing to animate a construction boom. And in the once-genteel world of
luxury retail, it has spurred a no-holds-barred skirmish for the attentions of
the roughly 14 million people who arrive each year, many of them cash-wielding
visitors from Latin America, Russia and Western Europe, and the five million
people who live here and in the area, including Broward and Palm Beach
Counties.
For example, in the Brickell area south of downtown,
cranes hover like colossal flamingos over dozens of building sites, the largest
of them the Brickell
City Centre, a $1 billion, 8.3-million-square-foot shopping, office,
condominium and hotel project on nine acres. Saks Fifth Avenue plans to open
the site’s anchor store in fall 2016.
“Seventy percent of the retail sales in Miami are to visitors
from Latin America,” said Deborah Overholt, the center’s retail leasing
director. “Their No. 1 priority is luxury. That’s what they’re looking for.”
In 2012, she said, visitors staying at hotels in the
Brickell area alone, which includes the Mandarin Oriental and the Four Seasons,
spent $800 million on shopping in and around Miami.
The Brickell project, she said, will cater to that
clientele. As for the Design District, Ms. Overholt said she was not concerned
that it may pull away a hefty amount of business long before Brickell can open
its doors. “We feel that high tides float all boats,” she said. “It’s better
for everyone if we’re all successful.”
On Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, a pedestrian thoroughfare
of shops and restaurants that has begun to attract upscale businesses, six
retail buildings sold in August for a total of $342 million, a transaction that
The Miami Herald called one of the largest in South Florida’s history.
And Bal Harbour Shops and the Aventura Mall,
which is increasingly a home to premium retailers, are planning their own
costly expansions.
Developers and shopkeepers seem unfazed, at least for
now, about warnings in recent quarterly reports from many high-end brands.
“Most of the negative financial issues in the luxury market are in China and
Europe,” Mr. Robins said. “But business in the U.S. remains robust, increasing
the importance of the Miami market.”
Matthew W. Lazenby, the 37-year-old president and chief
executive of Whitman Family Development, Bal Harbour’s parent company, seemed
untroubled, too.
“Over the years, Bal Harbour Shops has proved to be
largely defiant in terms of bucking prevailing trends, even in the luxury
sector,” he said. “We tend to think in terms of decades, not quarters, so we
are somewhat intentionally oblivious to flash-in-the-pan trends.”
Yet Bal Harbour’s long hegemony over Miami’s top-tier
retail market has faltered, apparently, at least in part because of its own
rules. For decades, Bal Harbour leases stipulated that if tenants opened stores
elsewhere in South Florida, percentages of their sales had to be paid to Bal
Harbour’s owners, the Whitman family. To some leaseholders, it amounted to a
prohibition on unfettered commerce.
In the last three years, frustrated tenants, notably
brands owned by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, began packing up their Bal
Harbour stores and moving out, many to temporary quarters in the Design
District while new flagships were built. Some also opened outlets in the
Aventura Mall, which draws 28 million shoppers a year in northeast Miami-Dade
County, while a few rented spaces in the Village of
Merrick Park, in Coral Gables, a few miles south of downtown Miami.
Mr. Lazenby said that some “bad blood” remained in the
wake of the leases’ so-called radius clause. “We did have a firm stance in the
past, but we’re not taking that stance anymore,” said Mr. Lazenby, whose
grandfather Stanley F. Whitman built the shops in 1965. “We frankly learned a
lot from all this.”
But in what seems a display of confidence, Bal Harbour
now is seeking approval of a $300 million expansion that will add roughly
300,000 square feet of store space, including a third department store to join
Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus.
On a recent Saturday, Bal Harbour’s parking lot was all
but full as shoppers chatting in various languages ambled in and out of
Balenciaga, Chanel, Harry Winston and some of the 100 or so other stores. Only
a couple of shops on the top floor were boarded up, awaiting new tenants. On
the ground floor, open to the sky and the palms, three sleek, shiny Jaguars
were lined up. “We lease vehicles to foreign nationals,” a pamphlet said in
Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and English.
“This is still a destination,” said Marquietta Buffaloe,
a sales assistant at the Bal Harbour outpost of the South Florida chain Books
& Books, where sales last year were up 7.5 percent over 2012.
At least one Bal Harbour shopper was irked that, after 30
years, Louis Vuitton had left and opened in the Design District and Aventura.
“I hated it when that happened,” said Ana Fernandez, who lives less than three
miles away. “I liked it here. But it’s not going to stop me from going to Louis
Vuitton just because it’s not here.”
A version of this article appears in print on December 7, 2014, on page ST14 of the New York edition with the headline: In Miami, Let Luxury Know No Limits.
