The Faena Hotel

What It Is

The Faena Hotel occupies a restored 1940s Collins Avenue building, reimagined by Argentine developer Alan Faena in collaboration with director Baz Luhrmann and designer Catherine Martin. The result is deliberately theatrical — a mural-lined "Cathedral," red-velvet rooms, and a gilded mammoth skeleton encased in glass on the beach. The hotel is the centerpiece of the broader Faena District, a multi-block stretch of Mid-Beach that Faena assembled with residences, an arts center, and a public art program. Reportedly one of the most expensive hospitality projects on the Beach at the time, it set out to be a destination unto itself.

Why It Matters

The Faena Hotel is a pure expression of the LatAm-capital era: a Latin American developer importing capital, taste, and ambition to remake a piece of Miami Beach in his own image. Where the Fontainebleau anchored Mid-Beach in the postwar boom, the Faena tried to re-anchor it half a century later as a luxury arts quarter — a top-down cultural district rather than an organic one. It is also a clean illustration of the city's animating logic: Miami works as a Latin American business and culture capital that happens to sit inside U.S. borders, and Faena bet a district on it.

Neighborhoods: Mid-Beach Eras: The Latam Capital Era