Short-term rentals with speakeasy to rise in Wynwood

A rustic-style 131-unit short-term rental with a speakeasy concept rooftop bar is coming to where Wynwood starts, next to the train tracks, developed by Rilea Group and Ann Arbor, MI-based real estate investors group Promanas, and hoping to break ground late next year.

The project, called The Rider, would be at Northwest 29th Street and the Florida East Coast Railway line, expanding on more than a half-acre of land, and would feature a painted-on sign to read “Wynwood starts here, take a ride on the wild side” on its façade, which is to have bricked walls and aged metal accents throughout.

The Rider is also to have 131 luxury units intended for short-term rentals, 6,500 square feet of ground floor retail, 146 parking garage spaces, and a 4,000-square-foot rooftop bar, inspired by Sugar at the East Miami Hotel and the 1920 to 1933 Prohibition area speakeasy bars, which were underground or secret bars that sold alcohol illicitly.

The bar is to be accessed on the east side of the building through a separate elevator than the one, on the west side, which would lead to the rental units.

“We wanted to make the entrance to the rooftop as far away as possible to not bother the residents,” said Diego Ojeda, president of Brickell-based Rilea Group. “We’re expecting a long line of crowd to go in, so we’re putting it directly on the side of the train track, where it’s going to be blocked off [from noise]. We believe that having a rooftop bar, where Wynwood meets Midtown, is going to be a huge hit in the area.”

The building is to be built as an apartment building, although the units would be short-term rentals advertised on platforms such as Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, and Hotels.com, he added. People are expected to stay about three to four days. “Having apartment-like units, with a balcony and a full kitchen, will be much more comfortable for them. People are going to prefer that rather than going to a small, crammed room in a hotel.”

The building units, which expand to 104,625 square feet in total, would be run like a hotel. The most likely business model Rilea Group is to employ to operate this project, Mr. Ojeda said, would be to operate the building in-house, with dedicated cleaning personnel and a freight elevator.

Other options, he said, would be to lease the units to a national operations company for them to run it and maintain it; or to lease the building to several different companies that would handle and upkeep each for a number of units.

“But most likely we’ll do it in-house,” he said.

The project passed in October the two local review boards it needed to proceed, the Wynwood Design Review Committee and the Urban Design Review Board, both with unanimous support.

“Since we’re on to the train tracks,” Mr. Ojeda said, “we’re using reclaimed tracks that were put on the side of our garage. Over time, those tracks will rust, so you’re going to have a very cool looking parking garage, [decorated] with train rail tracks, and I think that’s going to be something very unique in the area.”

The upcoming Brightline Station would be 85 yards away. Deforma Studio is to be the architect for The Rider and the interior designer is to be Radyca Inc., which are also headquartered in Brickell.

The project is expected to break ground at the end of 2023 and construction would take 24 months to complete, Mr. Ojeda said previously.

Rilea Group purchased in June 2021 the adjacent property to The Rider, which is to be the space for Mohawk at Wynwood – located at 56 NE 29th St.

– a 226-unit multi-family home rental in a 12-story building on 1.5 acres, with 22,000 square feet of ground floor retail and a potential for 3,500 square feet of office space, among other amenities.

The Mohawk at Wynwood site was purchased for $22 million, while The Rider site was purchased for $12.2 million.

“We now have 80% set up construction [plans], and now we’re submitting that to the building department,” said Mr. Ojeda. “We hope we can have a permit where we could break ground in summer of next year. We’re doing the partnership with Iconic Images, and with the Morrison Hotel Gallery in New York, to have dozens of collector-item photographs of rock-and-roll and punk rock singers during the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.”