The Faena Hotel Likely Arriving Fashionably Late, By A Year

Curbed Miami

by Emily Schmall

A source connected with Alan Faena’s restoration of the Saxony Hotel, part of the multi-block and extremely expensiveFaena District currently in the works, tells Curbed the hotel’s Roman & Williams led renovation is a year behind schedule, even as the adjacent Lord Norman Foster-designed Faena House residential tower climbs ever skyward.

The Saxony’s redo has been kept seriously under wraps, but Faena, the Argentine impresario “curating” his eponymous district, told Vanity Fair late last year that film director Baz Luhrmann and his wife and Hollywood costume designer Catherine Martin are in charge of the hotel’s interiors and staff uniforms. The Faena District, which ultimately aims to have condos, the hotel and a museum and cultural space (by yet another Pritzker Prize winner, Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture) packed into a combination of new build and Art Deco acquisitions, is a huge production, so the delay doesn’t come as any great surprise. That said, it may provide useful context for the recent news that Faena acquired $128 million in fresh capital as his team plows forward on Faena House and the Faena nee Saxony Hotel.