Surfside Condos

Surfside is the beach shrunk to neighborhood scale — a half-square-mile town between Bal Harbour and North Beach where the streets have names, the buildings stop at twelve stories, and Harding Avenue's bakeries and markets serve people who live here the year round. The town's mile of sand holds no velvet ropes and no towers; it holds a community center, a beach walk, and the most unlikely collection of world-class architecture on any small-town beach in America.

That collection sets the market's top end: the Four Seasons Surf Club, Richard Meier's restoration of the 1930 club; Fendi Château, the fashion house's one and only building anywhere; Arte's sixteen residences; and Eighty Seven Park, Renzo Piano's pavilion above its own private park at the town line. Around them, the classic row keeps Surfside within reach: Four Winds, SoliMar, Azure, Spiaggia, The Waves, Surfside Towers, Carlisle, Marbella, Manatee, Mirage, Ocean 88 and The Waverly.

A Surfside buyer is after the scarcest thing on this coast: a genuine town on genuine sand. Families come for the schools-and-sidewalks life with Bal Harbour's shops a walk away; collectors come because the height cap made this the one place the great architects built small. Both are wagering on the same scarcity. Every building's live inventory, pricing and twelve-month market report is linked from the directory above.