South Florida Fontainebleau hotel expanding

With Fontainebleau Las Vegas pushing ahead on its long-awaited debut next year, its developer is also expanding the original Fontainebleau hotel in South Florida.

Real estate mogul Jeffrey Soffer’s Fontainebleau Development on Tuesday announced plans for a new 50,000-square-foot events center at the iconic Fontainebleau Miami Beach.

Construction is underway on the project, which is scheduled to open in 2025.

Plans call for two ballrooms, 10 breakout rooms and a 9,000-square-foot rooftop deck, adding to the hotel’s existing 200,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor meetings and events space, according to a news release.

The new facility will also feature LED walls for “interior branding opportunities,” touchscreen technologies and “next-level” audio and visual tools, the release said.

Located on Collins Avenue, a hotel-lined thoroughfare that runs parallel to the beach, the Fontainebleau boasts 1,504 rooms, a nightclub, 12 restaurants and lounges, and a 40,000-square-foot spa.

Soffer acquired the 1950s-era hotel in 2005 and unveiled plans for the Fontainebleau on Las Vegas Boulevard that same year, teaming with former Las Vegas casino executive Glenn Schaeffer on the project.

They broke ground in 2007. But the roaring real estate market soon crashed, the economy imploded, and Las Vegas’ Fontainebleau went bankrupt in 2009, one of countless projects in Southern Nevada to get derailed after the bubble burst.

Billionaire Carl Icahn acquired the unfinished skyscraper in 2010 for around $150 million, and after leaving it largely untouched, sold it in 2017 for $600 million to developer Steve Witkoff and partners.

Witkoff renamed the project Drew Las Vegas but suspended construction in March 2020 amid the early chaos and shutdowns of the pandemic.

In a full-circle moment, Soffer reacquired the property in February 2021 in partnership with Kansas conglomerate Koch Industries, and later renamed it Fontainebleau Las Vegas.

The 67-story hotel-casino is scheduled to open in the fourth quarter of 2023.

One of Las Vegas’ tallest buildings, the Fontainebleau will have around 3,700 rooms, more than 550,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor meetings and convention space and a 90,000-square-foot retail district.

Contact Eli Segall at [email protected] or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter.