Exclusive: Loews hotel opens in Coral Gables as central part of city’s biggest development
It’s been 14 years since a developer bought seven acres of mostly empty land on Ponce de Leon Boulevard in Coral Gables. On Thursday, the Loews Coral Gables hotel opens its doors there to guests, weddings and business conference attendees.
The 242-room luxury hotel sits at the center of the development known as The Plaza Coral Gables, four blocks south of Miracle Mile. It also includes two office buildings, an apartment building and retail and dining areas. Loews operates a sister property in Miami Beach that opened in 1998.
“I was keenly aware of the opportunity to develop a hotel in Coral Gables,” Jonathan Tisch, CEO and chairman of Loews Hotels, said in an interview Wednesday at the new hotel.
“When I saw their plans and their concepts for this incredible mixed-use project … it became apparent that this was something very special. Also, because of how South Florida has grown as a market, I know that there would be very little overlap and we wouldn’t be cannibalizing the business that we have at the Loews Miami Beach.”
Loews is a rare large hotel opening in Coral Gables and it’s poised to compete with the Gables’ legendary Biltmore Hotel. Loews has the largest ballroom event space in the city, with 9,000 square feet that can be divided into five separate rooms with movable walls.
On the ninth floor, there’s a pool and hot tub with lounge chairs and cabanas facing east and an expansive patio and lawn for weddings and events. Guests will have uninterrupted sunset views to the west and north towards downtown Coral Gables.
“This hotel will be a microcosm of the South Florida market. We will be doing transient visitors, business travel and groups, and we will do quite a bit of social business like weddings, anniversaries, bar mitzvahs,” said Tisch, whose family’s history in South Florida’s lodging sector goes back almost 70 years.
The hotel’s architecture and interior design was done by CallisonRTKL, the firm behind the Brickell Mandarin Oriental and the Brickell Financial Center. It’s a sleek design with oversized, circular light fixtures and pops of jewel-tone fuschia and blue. The vast open lobby has high ceilings and seamlessly transitions into the hotel bar and restaurant with a wide open kitchen.
The hotel is a central part of The Plaza Coral Gables, the largest development in Coral Gables history. It covers 2.5 million square feet on 7.5 acres and is the brainchild of Agave Holdings Group managed by Carlos Beckmann and Jose Antonio Perez. Agave Holdings has ties to the popular Mexican tequila brand Jose Cuervo.
The 153 rental apartments on the plaza already have tenants and Beckmann said around 80% of the office, retail and dining space is leased.
One acre of the property is an open-air plaza with fountains, public arts and public seating.
“We’re investing there what’s worked for hundreds of years in Europe and Latin America, a central public space where people gather,” Beckmann said. “It’s ambitious but we’re trying to create that center of town where people go and hang out, have your kids run around and make it an evening. We’re trying to make it a place for locals.”
Tisch family’s deep roots in Miami
On the day before opening the Coral Gables hotel, Tisch, the leader of Loews Hotels and co-owner of the New York Giants professional football team, looked east from his lodging property toward the downtown Miami skyline.
“It’s just unbelievable how Miami has grown,” he said. “I’m 69 and I’ve been coming here since I was probably seven; it’s a remarkable transformation.”
Jonathan Tisch is the son of Bob Tisch and nephew of Larry Tisch, working class Brooklyn brothers who got into the hotel business in the 1940s with the purchase of several properties in New Jersey and New York. They came to South Florida in 1955 and opened the Americana Hotel in Bal Harbour, which later became the Sheraton and now is the St. Regis.
The Tisch family business expanded with Loews movie theaters, which eventually became the name of the family’s parent company, Loews Corporation. The conglomerate also includes Diamond Offshore Drilling and insurance company CNA Financial Corporation.
Jonathan Tisch took over as chairman of Loews Hotels in 1989, becoming the third generation of his family to run the hotel business that now counts 26 hotels in the United States with another one slated to open in Texas in 2024. After nearly two decades without a hotel in South Florida, a developer approached him about a “request for development proposal” in South Beach, on a piece of city land on 16th Street and Collins Avenue.
Tisch, a former television producer, used an unconventional sales pitch.
“The city gave each company one hour to present their proposals. I wanted to end our presentation in some memorable fashion so that they would know that we really care, especially after almost a 20-year hiatus of not doing business here,” he said, recalling his proposal.
“I wanted to show the city that we really wanted this hotel, which included me dressing in drag to look like my mother. … I wore a wig with blonde curls, full makeup and Sally Hanson press-on nails, and I spent the day interviewing people about what it’d be like for Loews to return to South Beach.”
Although today it appears to be a smart investment for Loews Hotels, it wasn’t always obvious.
“Remember, this was 24 years ago,” he said, referring to when South Beach was coming back after years of neglect. “Ian Schrager was developing the Delano Beach Club and we would call each other and be like, ‘Are we crazy?’”
The Delano Beach Club and Loews Miami Beach opened within six months of each other and were instant hits.
“Many people give us credit for really being the precursor of what is today this incredibly vibrant hotel and tourism sector scene in South Florida,” Tisch said. “Miami Beach worked out pretty well for us and for the community.
“Every time I come to South Florida, when I see a new building on the skyline, I get excited all over again,” he said of Miami’s growth over the decades. “When you think about the different submarkets that have become so much a part of the tourism story, realize that this is one of America’s great cities and one of the world’s great cities.”
This story was originally published November 3, 2022 at 5:30 AM.
