Collins Avenue bends just above 34th Street, and a sixteen-storey tower has held the inside of that curve since 1941. Aman is keeping it, and building a second one behind.
Roy France drew the Versailles Hotel in 1940. Art Deco, Streamline, a cupola on the roof, a one-storey lounge and dining room running east toward the sand and a pool deck on the south side. One hundred and forty-one rooms and a single apartment, built for three hundred thousand dollars.
It opened in January 1941 and closed again in April. That was how Miami Beach worked then. Hotels ran a season from December through the spring and shut for the summer heat. In 1955 Roy F. France & Son added an eight-storey wing in postwar modern, 132 more rooms, seven hundred thousand dollars. The building sits inside the Collins Waterfront Architectural District.
Aman takes the address in 2028. Fifty-six rooms and suites, twenty-two residences, an Aman Club and a spa of 1,860 square metres, roughly 20,000 square feet. It will be the brand’s second urban property in the United States after Aman New York.
The facade
Jean-Michel Gathy of Denniston has the Versailles. Gathy has drawn most of the Aman buildings that people picture when they picture Aman, and his brief here is a preservation job rather than a clean sheet. Redevelopment filings describe exterior bracing and shoring holding the historic elevations in position while the structure behind them is taken apart and rebuilt. For most of this decade the front of the hotel has been standing on steel.
Keeping it was never only sentiment. The curve in Collins Avenue puts the tower in the sightline for several blocks in either direction, which is why it registered as a landmark in the first place, and why a new building on the same parcel could not have bought the same arrival.
Aman Residences, Miami Beach, by Kengo Kuma & Associates · Courtesy of Aman
Behind it
Kengo Kuma & Associates has the new residence building, eighteen storeys and about 250 feet, reported as Kuma’s first residential tower in the United States. Timber lattice and louvre elements, terrace edges drawn thin, floors that step in and out so the elevation reads as a slow wave rather than a stack. The palette runs warmer than most of what has gone up along this beach.
There are twenty-two homes in it. All of them sold in 2021, years before the tower had a frame, at a reported average near five thousand dollars a square foot.
A hotel that used to close every April is being rebuilt for people who intend to own a piece of it.
The Splendid EditMid-Beach
The Faena District runs Collins Avenue from roughly 32nd Street to 36th, with Faena Forum and Faena Theater as its anchors. It is a compressed stretch, and it keeps a steadier calendar than the blocks south of Fifth, which is part of what the buyers were paying for.
The project is a Vladislav Doronin and Len Blavatnik venture, OKO Group and Aman on one side, Access Industries on the other. Bank OZK announced a 277 million dollar construction loan in January 2023, and an 85 million dollar mezzanine loan from a GoldenTree affiliate was reported in August 2025. Suffolk Construction is the contractor, working to a target of about one floor every two weeks.
Vertical construction started in August 2025. The date has moved more than once over the years, and it still does not quite agree with itself: the developer’s last public target was 2027, while Aman’s own page says 2028. The season the Versailles was built for lasted four months. The one it is being rebuilt for does not end.
Room and residence counts, spa area, design attribution and the 2028 opening from Aman’s own Aman Miami Beach pages, accessed 25 October 2026. The Versailles Hotel’s 1940 design, 1941 opening, room count, costs and 1955 addition from the Miami Design Preservation League’s historic resources report for 3425 Collins Avenue. Tower height, financing, contractor and construction progress as reported in the South Florida property press.
Photography courtesy of Aman — © Aman