Eden Roc (hotel)

The Eden Roc Miami Beach Resort is a resort hotel at 4525 Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, Florida. The building contains the Nobu Hotel Miami Beach. It was designed by Morris Lapidus in the Miami Modern style, and was completed in 1955-56. Renovated in 2008, the hotel has 631 guest rooms, including 96 suites. It was built on the site of the Warner Estate following litigation over development rights to the site and to the neighboring Firestone Estate, which became the Fontainebleau Hotel.

Morris Lapidus designed the Eden Roc for a site immediately to the north of his Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel built in 1954. The hotel was designed for Harry Mufson, who was a then-estranged former partner of Fontainebleau owner, Ben Novack, who together had previously created another Miami Beach landmark hotel (the design of which Lapidus did not initiate, grant completed) located about a half-mile to the south, the Sans Souci (which opened in 1949). The Eden Roc site had previously been the Warner Estate, owned by Albert Warner of the Warner Brothers. Mufson told Lapidus "I don't want any of the French stuff you used at the Fontainebleau. That's for kids." Novack was infuriated at both Lapidus and Mufson for building the Eden Roc, then considered one of the most elegant and luxurious hotels of its time, and retaliated in 1961 by building a blank 14-story North Tower as a "spite wall" on the Fontainebleau property to shade the Eden Roc's pool. All rooms faced south, and the side facing the Eden Roc consisted of an unpainted and unsightly "eye sore," in which the sole window, an oceanside penthouse on the north side, belonged to Novack, which he created for the purpose of "keeping an eye on" Harry and his guests at the Eden Roc. Mufson sued Novack in what would become one of the most acrimonious, personal legal architectural battles in Miami Beach history.

At the Eden Roc, Lapidus avoided the sweeping curves of the Fontainebleau, choosing instead a more formal composition reminiscent of earlier Miami Beach hotels. The hotel is surmounted by a large finned enclosure bearing the hotel's signs. An addition on the south side of the Eden Roc property was built to cover the spite wall and new pools were built in unshaded locations.

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