How Design Miami Founder Craig Robins Sees City Evolving

Craig Robins, a Miami native, founder of development firm Dacra and cofounder of Design Miami, has seen his home city through many phases. For starters, he grew up in South Beach when it was still a haven for retirees. In the 1980s, he saw his hometown hit a low point, marked by unrest and crime.

The son of Gerald “Jerry” Robins, a successful real estate developer and broker who moved from New York City to Miami Beach in the 1950s, Robins took the baton from his father and helped make Miami Beach cool again. He joined a small consortium in the 1980s and 1990s that was on a mission to restore value into South Beach’s Art Deco buildings, instead of demolishing them at a time when the area was rundown and overlooked. By doing so, they helped raise the neighborhood’s profile on a global scale.

Robins proceeded to take on the Miami Design District, then a neglected neighborhood filled with aging warehouses, buildings and a whole lot of crime. He helped bring Art Basel to Miami in the early 2000s alongside local leaders and organizers, and later cofounded Design Miami in 2005. An arts and creative community flourished and luxury design and fashion followed.

His philosophy has always been focused on tackling the neighborhood as a whole. “My philosophy in real estate has always been not about buying a piece of land and figuring out what the highest and best use of it is, but focusing on an area and taking each piece of land in that area that I work with and try to make the whole area better.”

Today, the Miami Design District is entering a new phase, and a symbol of that change is the David Chipperfield-designed Fouquet’s Hotel and Residences, Miami Design District, which will bring a hotel, public-facing amenities and Fouquet’s-branded residences to the neighborhood. Fouquet’s is best known for Brasserie Fouquet’s, the landmark restaurant on the Champs-Élysées founded in 1899. The firm later expanded into a hospitality brand. Robins talks with WWD about how the project marks a significant shift for a neighborhood long defined as a destination rather than a residential community.

WWD: Why is Fouquet’s Hotel and Residences, Miami Design District the right fit for Miami?
Craig Robins: One thing about the Design District is we’ve always tried to make it special, not like the same experience you have when you go anywhere else. I remember that for quite a while, people would say, “What would you compare the Design District to?” And it was always hard for me to answer. It’s like Tokyo or maybe in some ways like SoHo, but obviously very different. And so we wanted to find somebody that was, or a group that was really on brand for us, meaning they were very special. They did things in a creative and elevated way, but they also weren’t that common. Because a lot of these big brands that do hospitality, you see them everywhere. And Fouquet’s is still very, very unique and special, but perceived as being top tier. And we felt that was more on brand for us than going with a more traditional high-end brand.

WWD: Fouquet’s has a long history intertwined with fashion and cinema. In 2006, it expanded into Hôtel Barrière Le Fouquet’s Paris, opened by Groupe Barrière, extending the restaurant’s identity into hotels and residences. What makes Fouquet’s Hotel and Residences, Miami Design District, with interiors designed by Paris’ RDAI, feel more authentic than some other branded developments?
C.R.: This goes way beyond a brand. This is a company that has a brand that’s dedicated to providing a level of service and an experience that’s unique. So it’s not like sticking a car name on a building or, you know, what a lot of these people are doing, and I think it’s much more authentic.

WWD: Pegged for completion in 2030, how will this project change the landscape of the Miami Design District?
C.R.: Together, we made the decision to work with David Chipperfield, obviously one of the most important architects in the world. One of the things about the Fouquet’s Hotel and Residences is it’s gonna be taller than anything else in the neighborhood. So it’s gonna go a little bit west of where the current retail is. And there’ll be of course retail on the ground floor, but it’s gonna also add height. And by working with one of the great Pritzker Prize-winning architects in the world, we were very excited about that.

WWD: There are so many branded residences coming up in Miami — from Cipriani to Dolce & Gabbana. Do you see residential starting to overtake retail?
C.R.: The Design District has always been intended to be a mixed-use neighborhood. And as part of being a mixed-use neighborhood, what that means is it’s like a 24-hour experience that has lots of different uses that complement each other. It started with the furniture design showrooms, then, you know, art, design, Design Miami, then retail, obviously throughout the process, restaurants, ancillary uses. We’ve always had in the neighborhood office and residential has been part of it. And so now that it’s become known by the luxury brands, and this is what they say to me, as one of 15 locations in the world that are strategic for luxury, where they want to build these global flagships, we started to think about what other uses would complement that and add to the overall experience of the neighborhood. And we began to work with our partners and first think about hospitality and residential.

WWD: Did your work in South Beach shape the way you think about development today?
C.R.: The way I started was South Beach was a rundown, disregarded part of Miami and Miami Beach, and there were a small group of us that thought, against the conventional wisdom, that taking the largest collection of Art Deco buildings in the world and figuring out how to adaptively reuse them would be more valuable than demolishing them and building the kind of junk you see people build everywhere, and it was really a great experience.

WWD: How has your father’s legacy shaped your path?
C.R.: My dad worked in real estate development and was a very important mentor to me and very smart businessman. He did very nice projects, but they weren’t creative. My philosophy was to integrate culture, art, architecture, design into creating a sense of place. And, you know, the Design District was always conceived to be equally about art, architecture, design, and culture in general as a place to do business. And so I took what my dad taught me and then came up with my own kind of approach. But the foundation he gave me was really important to what I do, and I think I owe a lot of our success to the things that he taught me.

WWD: Miami has become a magnet for global second-home buyers. When did that shift really take hold?
C.R.: It was always a place where people wanted to have winter homes because of the climate. You could escape the cold. And I think with the cool factor that started with South Beach and then Art Basel, more people were attracted to it. And a big thing was during COVID because during COVID, people don’t necessarily think about it this way, but all of our habits went out the window. Whatever your habits were, you couldn’t do them during COVID, and so it gave us this freedom to kind of no longer be shackled by our habits and to do anything. And so many people felt like, “I can be anywhere,” and so they came to Miami.

WWD: You grew up in Miami. What did South Beach feel like in those early years?
C.R.: What I love is, at the beginning you’d see these famous celebrities, beautiful models, ’cause the catalogs were all doing their fashion shoots, and the leftover senior citizens. There was no one else coming. It was the early stages of South Beach were like that.

WWD: What do you think makes Miami’s cultural fabric unique today?
C.R.: Well, that’s one of the things that I love. Miami’s truly an international city. I think it’s unique in the United States that way. It’s got people from all over the U.S., from Central and South America. Europeans love Miami Beach even more now. You see Asians, and there were a lot less Asians because we’re so much further from Asia than California. It’s just geographically. So the diversity in Miami I think is incredible.