What’s Happening: The Moore Building has long anchored Miami’s Design District as a venue for big-ticket cultural events. Now, it’s entering its next era with fine dining, a boutique hotel, a members’ club, and gallery space.

The Download: Built on a former pineapple plantation by architect David P. Davis during the 1920s Florida land boom, the historic Moore Furniture Building has long influenced Miami’s creative sphere. The Art Deco gem served as a design emporium until the early 2000s, when developer and Dacra founder Craig Robins was courting Art Basel and ushering in his transformation of the building’s sleepy neighborhood of trade-exclusive furniture showrooms into the future Design District. After he renovated the Moore Building into a cultural venue, the inaugural Design Miami/ took place there in 2005 under a monumental site-specific sculpture by Zaha Hadid Architects that sprawls throughout its four-level open-air atrium and remains its photogenic centerpiece.

That was two decades ago, so further renovations were in order. The landmark has now entered its most recent era as The Moore, a multi-pronged lifestyle hub befitting the Design District’s evolution into the Magic City’s preeminent destination for high-end shopping, blue-chip galleries, and fine dining. Anchoring the operation on the ground floor is Elastika, a modern-American restaurant named after the fluid-like sculpture it sits under. Helmed by acclaimed Executive Chef Joe Anthony, previously the culinary director of New York’s two-Michelin-starred Gabriel Kreuther, the menu nods to The Moore’s century-long history and Miami’s cultural renaissance. Dishes run the gamut from citrus-cured kingfish crudo and grass-fed bison tartare to heirloom tomato gazpacho and miso-marinated beef tenderloin.

They can all be enjoyed in ICRAVE’s indulgent interiors—celadon velvet banquettes, hand-crafted wooden Sossego seating, and an expansive 18-seat bar—that glisten underneath a newly added skylight and complement an art collection curated by local advisor Monica Kalpakian. Elastika is only one piece of the puzzle, though. WoodHouse, the Dallas-based developer that specializes in social clubs and entertainment spaces, plans to fill out the rest of the building with a boutique hotel, executive offices, gallery space, and a private members’ club that promises the same allure as Soho Beach House Miami but more buttoned up. According to press materials, the “global leaders, innovators, and tastemakers” on its list of founding members include the fashion designer Francisco Costa, model Karolina Kurkova, beauty entrepreneur Barbara Sturm, and actor Waris Ahluwalia.

In Their Own Words: “South Florida has become a lot more powerful and dynamic,” Craig Robins told Business Traveler about the Design District’s evolution. “New York is still going to be the best city in the world, but Miami has come a long way. Miami is a city of the future and the last few years demonstrate that. Some cities have strength because of their history, but then there are cities that are ahead of the game.”

Surface Says: It looks like the members’ club renaissance is picking up more steam.

Have a news story our readers need to see? Write to our editors.

Reach the design world every morning. Find out more about advertising in the Design Dispatch.

Frank Stella, who died over the weekend at age 87, described his paintings in the simplest of terms: “What you see is what you see.” Outright rejecting interpretation may seem reductive for an artist who rewrote the rulebook on abstraction throughout his fruitful life and career, which saw him slowly morph from austere striped black paintings to reshaping canvases to his mural-size Protractor series rendered in eye-popping florid hues to spending a dozen years making bombastic mixed-media reliefs based on the chapters of Moby-Dick. The stylistic whiplash meant Stella’s oeuvre became larger than life, difficult to pin down, and not always warmly received, but it earned him commercial success and two MoMA retrospectives, the first at age 34. The late critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote that Stella’s impact on abstraction “was something like Dylan’s on music and Warhol’s on more or less everything.”

That meant Stella’s explorations on color, form, and abstraction were endlessly talked about and always on view. In 2015, when the Whitney Museum opened its new Renzo Piano building, a Frank Stella retrospective kicked things off. Adam Weinberg, the museum’s former director, commented that he stood out for “his impulsiveness, willingness to take risks, desire to be separated from the group, and to do things his own way.” Nonplussed by criticism, Stella experimented until the end. A series of his recent sculptures currently on view at Jeffrey Deitch embody his lifelong mission to “build a painting rather than painting a painting,” extending riotous forms into three dimensions where they float in anti-gravity.

There’s a certain kind of period grandeur, best embodied by the Renaissance Revival Wiener Staatsoper, that comes to mind when one thinks of Vienna. In such a city whose reputation for historic opulence precedes it, the Hoxton’s newest outpost serves as a defiant ode to postwar modernism. Thanks to a refit by Aime Studios, the 196-key property occupies the city’s former Chamber of Commerce. The 1950s-era building was designed by Carl Appel, something of a godfather of post-World War II reconstruction architecture. Everything from the wood, leather, and steel finishes to the pops of cherry-red and ochre ring true to the property’s midcentury roots and take inspiration from the prolific Vienna Workshop design movement. A speakeasy, auditorium that looks straight out of a Wes Anderson film, and a rooftop pool add to the allure.

Even at first glance, Thu-Van Tran’s Colors of Grey is rife with a sense of loss. Its palette of summery, evocative background colors bleeds into an ominous grayscale mélange informed by acts of ecocide against Vietnam, where the Paris-based painter was born.

Here, we ask an artist about the essential details behind a recent work.

Bio: Thu-Van Tran, 44, Paris.

Title of work: Colors of Grey.

Where to see it: “In Spring, Ghosts Return” at Almine Rech, Tribeca.

Three words to describe this work: A surrender between beauty and obscurity.

What was on your mind at the time: My mind was haunted by the first act of ecocide on earth and our collective imagination remembers the American aviation flying over the millenary forests of Vietnam to drop dioxins. The colors that make up the gray in the paintings each reduce a chemical agent, a toxicity. These combined colors, although intense, inevitably form a gray chromatic field, a field of melancholy.

Thomas Hayes Studio offers striking modern furniture that is unique in its fidelity to the best elements of mid-century design. Pieces are conceived in the distinctive vision of Thomas Hayes and are the expert, elegant synthesis of the Californian Craftsman revolution and Brazilian design from that period.

Surface Says: By synthesizing influences from the California Craftsman revolution and modern Brazilian design, Hayes has cultivated a design signature all his own.

Gijs Schalkx retrofits a jalopy to run on salvaged plastic that it converts into oil.

Chase enters the airport-lounge wars with snazzy drinks and wingback chairs.

Today’s hottest iPhone app may owe its popularity to government crackdowns.

This journalist read every single thing that Elon Musk posted on X for a week.