From motel camels to a Bentley elevator

The transformation of Sunny Isles Beach

If you drive along Collins Avenue through Sunny Isles Beach today, the city can feel almost unreal. On one side is the Atlantic Ocean, on the other the Intracoastal Waterway, and between them a narrow strip of land where towers stand so tall and so close together that the street becomes a glittering canyon of glass, concrete, balconies and private pools in the sky. Here, cars do not simply enter a garage; they enter an elevator that lifts them directly to a residence. Here, Porsche and Bentley have become not only automotive brands, but architectural ideas. Here, ocean air mixes with the scent of serious money, and the word condo has long stopped meaning simply an apartment.

But not so long ago, the same city looked completely different.

Sunny Isles Beach was not always a vertical showcase of ultra-luxury Miami. In the middle of the twentieth century, it was one of South Florida’s most cheerful, affordable and slightly eccentric resort places - a landscape of family vacations, roadside fantasy, neon and themed motels. Before Collins Avenue became a corridor of billionaire towers, it was known as Motel Row.

And in that contrast lies the entire drama of Sunny Isles.

In 1920, investor Harvey Baker Graves purchased land here and named it Sunny Isles, America’s Riviera. The name itself sounded like a promise: not merely a beach, but an American version of the European resort dream. After the opening of the Haulover Bridge in 1925, the area became more accessible from Miami Beach, and the swampy, sparsely settled land gradually began to turn into a resort strip. But the true character of Sunny Isles took shape later, in the 1950s and 1960s, when dozens of motels rose along Collins Avenue.

This was the architecture of the automobile age. America was driving to its vacations, and a hotel had to catch the eye instantly from the road. A simple façade was not enough. It needed a story, an image, the promise of a small adventure before the guest even stopped at reception.

That is how Sahara, Suez, Dunes, Aztec, Waikiki, Thunderbird, Castaways and other motels appeared, with exotic names, fantasy façades, decorative camels, palms, pseudo-Eastern and Polynesian motifs. This was not architectural purism. It was honest resort theatre - small, bright, commercial, but alive.

Sunny Isles in those years was not trying to be Palm Beach. It was more democratic, louder, closer to the middle class. Families vacationed here, along with retirees from the North and tourists who wanted sun, beach and the feeling of stepping into a movie about vacation. In the evening, one could go to a show, a restaurant, a bar, a dance floor. Castaways had its famous Wreck Bar; other places hosted performances and entertainers, and alongside the simplicity of beach life there existed a real culture of entertainment. In the memories of old-timers, the names Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin appear, along with stories of the Beatles spending time in local nightspots during their visit to South Florida.

Most importantly, Sunny Isles had a human scale. Not poor, not primitive - simply intimate. Two-storey buildings, signs, open parking lots, pools, family restaurants, morning coffee, children with beach towels, tourists who came not to buy status, but to live by the sea for a few days. This was Florida before sterile luxury: a little kitsch, a little neon, a lot of sun and an almost childlike belief that vacation should be fun.

But over time, that cheerful simplicity became vulnerable.

By the 1980s and 1990s, many of the motels had aged. The tourism market had changed. South Beach was undergoing its revival, Bal Harbour was securing its identity as an expensive address, Aventura was growing as a retail and residential magnet, and Sunny Isles found itself between eras. The old motels no longer looked fresh, but the land beneath them had become too valuable to remain in its old form. The narrow strip between ocean and Intracoastal suddenly became ideal raw material for a completely different Florida.

In 1997, Sunny Isles Beach became an independent municipality. This was not merely an administrative step. It was the point after which the city began rapidly rewriting its own biography. Almost all of the old one- and two-storey buildings of Motel Row gradually gave way to high-rise condo towers and hotels. Where Sahara and Thunderbird signs once competed, developers, architects, brands, services, penthouse views and price per square foot began competing instead.

Sunny Isles entered a new economy - the economy of vertical luxury.

The transformation was harsh, but logical. The city had rare advantages: ocean frontage, proximity to Aventura and Bal Harbour, a relatively small territory, international buyer demand, readiness for redevelopment and less rigid historic protection than Miami Beach. The old motels may have been charming, but they did not have the institutional protection that preserves architectural memory in cities more sensitive to heritage. As a result, Sunny Isles did not so much update itself as change genres.

From a roadside resort, it became a vertical private club.

Towers began rising one after another: Trump-branded towers, Acqualina, Jade, Turnberry Ocean Club, Ritz-Carlton Residences, Porsche Design Tower, and now Bentley Residences and St. Regis Residences. Each new building had to explain why it was not just another tower by the ocean. In a world where a wealthy buyer can choose between Miami Beach, Bal Harbour, Surfside, Brickell, Fisher Island, New York, Dubai and Monaco, an ocean view alone is no longer enough. One must sell not square footage, but an idea of life.

Sunny Isles understood this earlier than many.

Porsche Design Tower became one of the clearest symbols of that logic. Its famous Dezervator - the automobile elevator named after developer Gil Dezer - allowed residents to rise together with their cars directly to their sky garage. In practical terms, it is a technology of privacy: a person drives into the building, does not leave the car, rises to their floor and parks almost at the front door. In symbolic terms, it is even stronger: the automobile, the central object of twentieth-century desire, no longer remains below. It becomes part of the interior, an extension of the owner’s identity, a view from the living room onto the self.

This was luxury in a distinctly Miami key: slightly absurd, technically complex, cinematic and absolutely legible to the market. In New York, status often hides behind an address and the history of a building. In London, behind club culture and old property. In Miami, status likes an effect. Porsche Design Tower gave it the perfect effect: live in the sky and park a supercar beside the sofa.

But Bentley Residences promises to make this idea even more complete.

If Porsche Design Tower was a revolutionary gesture - we will lift your car into your apartment - Bentley Residences turns the car elevator into an entire architecture of private life. The project is presented as the first residential tower under the Bentley brand. Its idea is not merely that a car can go upstairs. More important is that the resident’s entire path - from arrival at the building to the private garage inside the residence - should feel like an extension of a grand touring automobile: smooth, private, expensive and without unnecessary contact with the outside world.

Bentley Residences is planned with multiple Dezervator elevators, private garages in the residences, space for multiple cars, electric vehicle charging and a system in which the car is recognized and guided to the correct elevator. In other words, this is no longer only a spectacular toy for a collector. It is a model of ultra-private housing, where the automobile becomes a key, a capsule, a personal elevator and part of the home environment.

In this sense, Bentley is indeed “more advanced” than Porsche not because one brand is more prestigious than the other, but because the newer project develops the idea itself. Porsche Design Tower made the car elevator the central wow feature. Bentley Residences tries to make it part of a fuller philosophy: not the display of the car, but the seamless privacy of a life in which the resident does not have to intersect with the world more often than necessary.

This is the evolution of Sunny Isles: old Motel Row was built around accessibility; new Sunny Isles is built around control of access.

In the past, a motel shouted through its sign: “Stop here!” Today, a tower says almost the opposite: “Not everyone gets in.” In the past, a car stood in front of the room as a symbol of the freedom of the road. Now the car rises to the 50th or 60th floor as a symbol of personal territory. In the past, vacation was horizontal - beach, parking lot, pool, restaurant, room. Now luxury has become vertical - lobby, elevator, private foyer, sky garage, terrace pool, ocean view, bay view, sunset view.

That is why Collins Avenue can feel like a canyon. This is not merely a metaphor. High-rises line the narrow road in such a way that a person below feels the scale of the new economy physically. Sun passes between towers, shadow falls onto the road, glass façades catch the ocean light, and the old beach town almost disappears from view. From a penthouse, this looks like victory. From the sidewalk, it feels like an urban experiment with consequences that are not always gentle.

The transformation of Sunny Isles cannot be described only with enthusiasm. Yes, the city has become one of South Florida’s most recognizable luxury condo addresses. Yes, development has brought tax base, infrastructure, global brands, international buyers and architectural ambition. Yes, new projects have reached price levels that would once have seemed impossible for a former motel strip: at the top end, the conversation is no longer simply about millions per residence, but about thousands of dollars per square foot, especially in new branded residences.

But the price of this transformation is the near-total disappearance of the old Sunny Isles. Not only the buildings vanished. The social tone disappeared. Motel Row was a place where the middle class could afford a piece of oceanfront Florida. Contemporary Sunny Isles is a market for capital - often global, mobile capital - buying not so much housing as lifestyle, tax geography, security, views and status.

This is not a moral verdict, but a fact. Cities change in the direction of money. The only question is what remains of a place’s memory when the square foot becomes more important than the story.

Some fragments of the past can still be sensed. Newport Fishing Pier recalls the old resort logic: a walk, fishing, the horizon, people without passes or valet. Sahara Beach Club remains a rare trace of another era, even in a very different context. In old photographs, there are camels at the Sahara, the modernist lines of the Thunderbird, tourists by pools, signs trying to be brighter than the signs next door. It looks almost naïve compared with Bentley Residences, but there is life in that naïveté.

And here appears the most interesting paradox. Sunny Isles has always been artificial. The old motels also sold fantasy: Egypt, Polynesia, desert, adventure, exoticism for a few nights by the ocean. The new towers also sell fantasy: a private resort in the sky, a garage inside the residence, branded luxury, beach club, wellness, skyline, contactless movement from car to living room. The difference is not that the past was “real” and the present is “fake.” The difference is the scale of capital and the audience.

In the past, Sunny Isles staged a dream for the middle class. Now it stages a dream for the global wealthy.

That is where the new aesthetic comes from. Where a camel in front of a motel once had to make a child shout happily from the back seat of a car, today a car elevator must make an adult collector feel that the world has finally adjusted itself to his habits. Both gestures are theatrical. One belongs to the culture of roadside America; the other to the culture of branded wealth.

For a Russian-speaking reader in Toronto, Sunny Isles has an additional meaning. This is not abstract Florida. It is one of those places in South Florida where Russian, Ukrainian, Israeli, Latin American and Eastern European diasporic geographies have long intersected with real estate, seasonal apartments, family vacations and the dream of winter sun. For many people from northern cities, Sunny Isles became an understandable symbol: here one can live by the ocean, speak several languages, be close to Aventura Mall, Bal Harbour Shops, restaurants and services, and at the same time exist in a vertical resort where everything is organized around convenience.

But this is exactly why the city is so interesting as a cultural phenomenon. It shows how the very idea of a good place to live is changing. In the past, the ideal resort stayed close to the ground: room, parking, beach, pool, café. Today, the ideal resort for an ultra-luxury buyer is a residence above the ground, where one can have beach, restaurant, spa, gym, private dining, pool, security, parking, service and view without leaving one’s own tower. The city contracts into a vertical complex.

This is the new form of luxury: not to go out into the city, but to have the city inside the building.

Sunny Isles Beach travelled from Motel Row to Billionaire Canyon not because it became the accidental victim of developers. It was prepared for this by its geography. A narrow strip of land between water and water almost inevitably becomes either a mass resort or an elite enclave. When land value rises, horizontal romance loses to vertical economics. A two-storey motel cannot compete with a 60-storey tower if the market is ready to pay for view, brand and privacy.

The question is whether the soul of the place can be preserved in the process.

For now, the answer is ambiguous. The new Sunny Isles is impressive. Its skyline has truly become one of the most dramatic in South Florida. Porsche Design Tower and Bentley Residences have made the city a laboratory of automotive architecture. Acqualina and Ritz-Carlton Residences have strengthened its reputation for service-driven luxury. St. Regis promises another wave of branded living. All of this has created an address that cannot be mistaken for an ordinary beach town.

But the old warmth has almost disappeared. It cannot be restored with lobby décor. It cannot be built into an amenity deck. It belonged to a different scale, a different economy and a different idea of vacation. Perhaps the most honest approach is not to pretend that one version is better than the other. Sunny Isles has simply become a mirror of the American dream in two eras.

In the 1950s, the dream looked like a family car, a motel with a fantasy sign, the beach across the road and dinner without a tie.

In the 2020s, it looks like a glass tower, a private pool on the terrace, a personal garage in the sky and a Bentley rising home with its owner.

Between these two images lies the story of contemporary Florida: from democratic sunshine to privatized horizon, from neon resort to the architecture of capital, from roadside kitsch to branded luxury.

Sunny Isles Beach is no longer the town with camels in front of a motel. But it is precisely the memory of those camels that makes its current canyon more interesting. Without the past, the modern towers would be only expensive buildings. With the past, they become the final scene of a long performance about how the dream by the ocean changes.