Bal Harbour and the Design District – Miami's two luxury shopping addresses

Bal Harbour Shops opened in 1965 on a former prisoner-of-war camp and has been counted among the world's highest-grossing shopping centres. Design District was a run-down furniture quarter that became an open-air museum. A guide to Miami's two luxury addresses.

Miami has two addresses for luxury shopping that differ as much from each other as they do from ordinary shopping centres. Bal Harbour Shops, at the northern tip of Miami Beach, is an open-air arcade beneath palm trees, built by a family that still owns it. The Miami Design District, on the mainland, is an entire neighbourhood where fashion houses share space with architecture, public art and two museums with free admission.

Bal Harbour Shops – Whitman's shopping centre from 1965

Bal Harbour Shops is located at 9700 Collins Avenue in Bal Harbour, an affluent suburb north of Miami Beach. The land, purchased in 1957 for $2 per square foot, had been an army camp and, during the Second World War, a prisoner-of-war camp. Stanley Whitman spent the years 1954–1962 studying shopping centres throughout the US before building his own, and he chose an open layout with the tropical climate and the seaside location in mind.

The mall opened in 1965 and is still owned by the Whitman family. Neiman Marcus arrived in 1971 and Saks Fifth Avenue in 1976, and today there are around 100 shops on three floors covering just over 40,000 square metres. In 2015, sales reached 3,000 dollars per square foot, placing Bal Harbour Shops among the world's highest-grossing shopping centres, and in 2022, 3,400 dollars was reported, according to Wikipedia. In 2017, a 550 million dollar expansion was approved.

Opposite are the beachfront hotels: The Ritz-Carlton Bal Harbour opened in 2014, and St. Regis Bal Harbour was built on the site of a hotel that was demolished in 2007.

Miami Design District – from pineapple plantation to luxury district

The Design District is located on the mainland, roughly between North 36th Street and North 43rd Street and between West First Avenue and Biscayne Boulevard. The land was once a pineapple plantation in Buena Vista, and in the 1920s T. V. Moore built the Moore Building for the family's furniture company. By the 1980s the area had fallen into decline, and it was not until the late 1990s that design and art shops began opening again.

Property developer Craig Robins of Dacra is usually credited with the turnaround: he bought rundown buildings and attracted designers here, and Dacra then expanded the luxury retail scene together with L Real Estate. Christian Louboutin became the first luxury brand in the neighbourhood in 2009, and today there are flagship stores for Louis Vuitton, Dior, Prada, Saint Laurent and Hermès.

Architecture and art in the Design District

The quarter is as much an exhibition as it is a shopping street. In Palm Court stands Buckminster Fuller's Fly's Eye Dome, and in the Moore Building hangs Zaha Hadid's Elastika. Museum Garage, which opened in winter 2019, is a car park with façades by several different design and architecture firms.

Two museums stand side by side. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami moved in December 2017 into a building of around 3,500 square metres by Aranguren + Gallegos Arquitectos, with an outdoor sculpture garden. Next door, the de la Cruz Collection displays Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz's private collection of contemporary art from the 1980s onwards. Both have free admission.

How to combine the two

The Design District and Bal Harbour are on opposite sides of Biscayne Bay and require a car or taxi between them. Do the Design District in the morning with the museums, and Bal Harbour in the afternoon. See the areas in VERA PI's Miami guide, on the map of Miami and Miami Beach, and find more city guides among metromode.co's destinations.

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