Going to E11even
Miami’s E11even is no ordinary nightclub. The hedonistic spot has spawned residential towers, its own vodka brand and a global cult following. And now, incredibly, there’s talk of creating an entire new district in its image.
It’s close to 3.00 am on the Friday before Formula 1 weekend in Miami, and the nightclub known as E11even is heaving. At the owner’s table, just above the dance floor, managing partner Dennis DeGori is showering the crowd below with stacks of cash. “Make it rain,” he says, demonstrating the proper tossing technique so the bills scatter high and wide. Thousands of singles carpet the floor already.
Waitresses hoist magnums of Dom Pérignon, cutting a path through VIPs in the pit. These guests shelled out extravagantly for a prime spot in the club’s throbbing centre. This weekend, the most coveted tables—which encircle an elevated stage, a dance floor, and the DJ booth—will require a minimum tab of US $30,000 (around $46,000) apiece for booze, food, and entertainment. Unlike at most venues, the big spenders here aren’t roped off along the periphery. “I flipped the usual formula,” DeGori says. “At E11even, everyone else is a spectator to the VIP experience.”
A pair of acrobats suspended from ropes contort above the dance floor, their routine pausing the smoke-machined, laser-beamed, strobe-battered madness. Drones buzz around the room, filming everything for the post-party highlight reel.
Just after 4.00 am, DJ Deadmau5—the electronic-dance-music (EDM) superstar who often sells out stadiums—begins his set, filling the 1,250-square-metre club with pulsing sound, the LED eyes of his signature mouse helmet glowing green. Large frosted bottles of E11even-brand vodka are crammed into ice buckets everywhere. Go-go dancers, clad only in race-car helmets and body paint applied to look like F1 driver uniforms, flank the DJ booth. Other young women in lingerie are gyrating on platforms throughout the room. In the middle of it all, a “massage girl” offers head rubs. Down in the pit, a bride-to-be celebrates with friends, flipping back her white veil.
The party rages on well past dawn, as it will the next night, when rapper Travis Scott headlines, and the night after that, when another star, DJ Tiësto, will whip the crowd into a frenzy. The club will earn millions in just three or four days. And night after night, long lines of hopefuls will wait hours to get in, paying anywhere from US$350 to US$100,000 for a table, depending on who’s performing—and the location of that table.
In the decade since it opened its doors in downtown Miami, E11even has transcended the space most nightclubs occupy to become a full-fledged phenomenon, with a cult following and vast global reach. In 2023, E11even-hosted parties popped up at the Cannes Film Festival and the Monte Carlo Grand Prix, exporting the club’s particular brand of unbridled excess as they’d done previously at seven Super Bowls and the 2018 World Cup, in Moscow. Recently, management has been scouting locations for new clubs in Tokyo, London, New York City and Las Vegas. “We’ve had a ton of offers, but it has to be right,” DeGori says.
COURTESY OF E11EVEN
E11even is an unlikely sensation, mixing the risqué, somewhat tawdry, world of bachelor-party lap dances and dollar bills stuffed into G-strings with A-list musical acts and Cirque du Soleil–style theatrics, all packaged with plush gold banquettes and a bone-rattling sound system. It’s an oddly seamless mash-up of manic luxury and sexually charged hedonism, fuelled by large-format bottles of Champagne, vodka and tequila. “It’s many different things to many different people,” says DeGori. “To explain how it works together—you can’t do it.”
Over the years, E11even has spawned brand extensions in music and vodka and NFTs, in millions of dollars in merchandise—mostly US$50 baseball hats—and in the billion-dollar real-estate developments rising on the lots around the club. The 213-metre, 65-storey E11even Residences condo-hotel tower is under construction across the street and expected to open in two years, with interiors from NYC firm AvroKO. A 1,860-square-metre poolside day club will overlook E11even’s new rooftop restaurant, Giselle, a fitting showcase for chef Gustavo Zuluaga’s maximalist cooking. His more-is-definitely-more menu pairs toro-tartare cones, lobster thermidor and wagyu beef tomahawk steaks with a thumping beat. A second, equally tall tower called E11even Residences Beyond will follow, connecting to the first by skybridge; a third is planned for just up the street.
11EVEN might be the first nightclub anywhere to birth a residential tower, which is not all that surprising when you consider its roots. The club’s origins go back to the early 2000s, when co-founder Marc Roberts—a former sports agent from New York who had worked with heavyweight boxing champ Shannon Briggs and NFL star Tyrone Wheatley—began buying land in South Florida. Entering the real-estate- speculation game, he set his sights on Miami’s mostly desolate Park West neighbourhood, snapping up as many abandoned buildings and vacant lots as he could. Roberts didn’t know what the area, tucked between Miami’s Design District and the luxury enclave on the waterfront at Brickell, might eventually become, but he was willing to bet it would be worth a fortune one day. “I just knew it was the best land in Miami,” he says.
ADINAYEV/RENDERS ARX SOLUTIONS
Attempts to transform the area into a 24-hour entertainment district, bringing a bit of Las Vegas into central Miami, had mostly fizzled out by 2012, when Roberts began angling to acquire the Gold Rush, a strip club with a rare 24-hour license to serve alcohol and host nude entertainment, abutting plots he’d already bought. Roberts guessed owner Jack Galardi, an octogenarian gentlemen’s-club mogul known to be a shrewd and intractable businessman, would drive a hard bargain—if he could be persuaded to sell at all.
“Everybody said, ‘That’s the golden piece—of everything you assembled, you’re not getting that. Nobody will get that. He’s not selling, ever,” ‘recalls Roberts. Worried his reputation as a real-estate player might drive up the price, Roberts refrained from approaching Galardi directly. Instead, he sent in a “beard”, a young restaurateur who found Galardi in the hospital, dying of cancer. “I always use a beard,” says Roberts. “I’ve done maybe 60 deals in this neighbourhood; they hear my name, they think it’s lottery time.” The stand-in outlined fantastical plans for a celebrity-backed restaurant—with just enough star power to make it interesting. “I sent my good buddy, he had a little restaurant, just a little guy,” says Roberts. “He said, ‘I want to buy this with an athlete, he’s really hot on it, we better act quick.’ ” Roberts says he even convinced a former client from his sports-agent days (he won’t say who) to lend their name to the ruse.
In the weeks after the Gold Rush deal closed for US$11.9 million, news reports began trumpeting developments coming to Park West and its environs. All at once, a number of long-debated infrastructure improvements were announced: the neighbourhood wasn’t on its way to becoming a new Las Vegas Strip, exactly, but suddenly a train station, a mega-mall (which Roberts had been attached to early on), and a highway extension were all in the works. The value of the land soared overnight.
Roberts and his actual partner on the Gold Rush deal, Michael Simkins—a young power player on the Miami real-estate scene with deep roots in the community (his industrialist father, Leon, had been a major local philanthropist)—decided to keep the strip club going as a revenue source while they considered the fate of the site. They hired a consultant to help locate a third party to run the place for them. “Every strip-club operator in the world contacted us,” says Roberts. “We were the prettiest girl at the prom.”
Rather than partner with any of them and fork over the bulk of the profits, Roberts and Simkins decided to build their own management team. They flew in DeGori, who’d spent more than 30 years running clubs and who came widely recommended, from Vegas. DeGori had opened dozens of venues across the country for his mentor Michael J. Peter—the founder of the Solid Gold and Pure Platinum brands who is sometimes called the godfather of the modern gentlemen’s club—before launching his own spots, including Scores Chicago and the Penthouse Club in Las Vegas. Instead of simply taking over the Gold Rush, DeGori suggested replacing the club with a new sort of hybrid nightlife model, mixing elements of a gentlemen’s club, a classic dance club and a live-music venue. It was an audacious idea, and one he’d been toying with for decades. “I thought, ‘I can put everything together, and it will be spectacular,’ ” he says.
JEFFERY SALTER
Roberts and Simkins, seduced by DeGori’s vision, brought him on board as a partner. Together they began developing plans, eventually gutting the building down to its exterior walls. (To retain the valuable 24-hour license, the club itself couldn’t get any bigger than its original 1,250 square metres.) Simkins told friends he believed it “would be one of the top-five most successful nightclubs in the United States after it opened.” They had their doubts.
“I’m spending all this money and I’m telling people this, and it’s in this neighbourhood no one is really visiting—it was totally off the radar—and they all thought it would be out of business within a year,” Simkins says.
DeGori—who, despite the whole “Make it rain” thing, describes himself as reserved and behind-the-scenes—began assembling a dream team, a sort of Ocean’s Eleven heist crew to help him execute his plan for the club, luring high-powered operating partners, many from Las Vegas, with generous offers.
“Moving bonus, signing bonus—I felt like a first-round draft pick,” says Gino LoPinto, a veteran of the after-hours-club scene in Vegas who came on as the gregarious front man in charge of marketing and talent booking. Daniel Solomon, who had helped Marquee, in Vegas, become the highest-grossing dance club in the country after rising to become the youngest general manager in the Tao group at 25, brought his deep contacts in the EDM scene. A VIP wrangler named Rob Crosoli made the move from Chicago. Even security chief Derick Henry, who had done protection work for Prince, the Jonas Brothers and Mary J. Blige, got a piece of the business. “In a club like this, security is huge,” says DeGori.
COURTESY OF E11EVEN
As what would turn out to be a US$44 million build-out continued, the owners and managing partners brainstormed ideas for a name. They wanted something open-ended, vague, hard to define. It wasn’t a classic dance club, concert venue, lounge or cabaret theatre. It was all of those things, and none of them.
The address was on 11th Street. DeGori, whose daughter had just turned 11, began seeing the number everywhere. “I really like it, because it says nothing,” he explains. They couldn’t trademark a number, but a distinctive spelling, E11even, would work. In the build-up to opening, they erected cryptic billboards across Miami. “Whatis11.com” followed by “It is what you think it is.” According to LoPinto, “We never explained what it was.”
A pre-opening party, announced in the New York Post, doubled as a casting call for “60 sexy beach bodies” to appear in the Entourage movie—the film’s writer-director, Doug Ellin, was an old friend of Roberts’s. Invitations to other launch festivities, sent to several hundred VIPs, arrived in black boxes that played opera music when opened. Inside was a gold mask and a silver key to the club. “We sent one to Steve Wynn, to Trump, to a lot of people we knew wouldn’t come,” says LoPinto. Another list, of people more likely to show up and spend money, received an American Express–style black card loaded with US$11,000 in credit to be used during the club’s first year in business.
E11even, billed as the “world’s first and only 24/7 Ultraclub,” was originally open non-stop seven days a week. (Hours were later curtailed by the pandemic, and now the club is open around the clock from only Wednesday to Monday.) The first few months were a struggle. “We were bleeding money,” says Roberts, “and then all of a sudden, it just started clicking.” Soon, celebrities began showing up. Leonardo DiCaprio made an early appearance. One night, Miley Cyrus jumped onto the pole in the middle of the pit. Idris Elba moonlighted in the DJ booth.
COURTESY OF E11EVEN
After Usher performed during the club’s first New Year’s Eve, E11even began booking some of the biggest names in hip-hop and electronic music, from Diplo to DJ Marshmello, Cardi B. to Snoop Dogg. Drake, who rang in the New Year in 2016, was the first artist to perform in the pit, surrounded by fans, pioneering the up-close-and-personal staging that has since become a hallmark of E11even at its wildest. (Altogether, Drake has played the club seven times.)
For the first few years, as the business’s fortunes began soaring, Roberts and Simkins remained mostly hands-off—more landlords than operators. Simkins, active in the civic affairs of his Miami Beach community, worried about the reputational risk of attaching his name to the club and the potential strain on his marriage. His wife, Nikki, who’d been his high-school sweetheart, “was freaked out,” he says. “It was one thing to buy it and lease it, which she was on board for, but this shift into partnering on the business was heavy for her. So certain promises were made… that I would only go to the club with her, and that was the rule for the first six years.”
COURTESY OF E11EVEN
But as the cult of E11even soared, the stigma soon faded. “People were connecting emotionally with the brand, superfans were developing,” Simkins says. Eventually Nikki, a former diamond dealer, took on a role in the business herself, helping to launch the club’s vodka, produced in Florida under the E11even label, as CEO of the brand’s spin-off company.
The E11even management team, always quick to capitalise on new trends, jumped on the cryptocurrency craze early on, as Bitcoin mania engulfed Miami during the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried’s house-of-cards exchange, FTX. E11even became the first nightclub in the country to accept Bitcoin. During Miami’s inaugural Bitcoin Conference, the club was often packed with big spenders flashing their crypto wallets. E11even even sold a special diamond-encrusted Bitcoin hat for US$50,000.
In late 2021, the company spent nearly US$400,000 acquiring a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT—No. 11, of course. (The value of Bored Ape NFTs has since plummeted.) E11even’s Ape became the new mascot and the launching pad for a label, E11even Music, run by LoPinto. (It later released a track from a new EDM artist, 11Ape, an in-house creation who performs anonymously wearing a Bored Ape mask.) In the spring of 2022, the club released its own collection of 1,111 NFTs. Buyers were granted membership in the E11even Captain’s Club and special access to the facilities, among other perks, for 3 ETH (about US$7,900 at the time).
COURTESY OF E11EVEN
The halo effect of an unforgettable evening may help explain why so many of the club’s business partnerships have succeeded. Real-estate developer Ryan Shear, principal of PMG, which has built many condo towers in Miami and New York, was having a big night out at E11even a few years ago when he asked to meet Roberts, who was seated upstairs at his usual table overlooking the pit. Soon they were tossing around ideas for an E11even high-rise on the land Roberts and Simkins owned across the street. “We’d kill it,” said Roberts, selling the proposal hard.
A few meetings later, Simkins and DeGori were in on the deal. Soon the club’s managing partners also signed on, enthusiastic about expanding the debauched spirit of E11even to a much bigger platform. “There’s not really a Vegas-style property in Miami—great beach club, great spa, great food and beverage offerings, 24-hour lobby bar,” says LoPinto of the hybrid condo-hotel plan.
COURTESY OF E11EVEN
The first units went on sale in January 2021, a year and a half before a foundation was poured. All were sold fully furnished, so they could function as hotel rooms when not in use by their owners. A few deep-pocketed E11even fans bought up entire floors. Prospective buyers were tantalised by a whole set of perks, including access to a beach club on South Beach, about a 20-minute drive away, and to the tower’s many amenities, among them a 930-square-metre spa and wellness studio offering Ayurvedic treatments designed by Deepak Chopra (his first residential project), a cigar club and a restaurant. The 449-unit tower, containing everything from US$300,000 studios to US$10 million penthouses, sold out in six months.
A second tower hit the market in late 2021, with plans for condos, a private members’ club, and a helipad on top. Sibling influencers Jake and Logan Paul both reportedly bought penthouse units, with listing prices of US$20.5 million apiece, off-plan. A third tower went on sale a few months later. A fourth isn’t out of the question, says Simkins, once the last one sells out.
“Come back in a couple of years—you’re not going to believe your eyes,” says Roberts, a born salesman, of the partner s’plans to transform the area surrounding the club into one massive brand extension. Recently, they have started referring to it as District E11even. “This is a whole new city,” he says. “This will be the most famous entertainment street in the world when we’re done with it.” ●
Click here to subscribe to Robb Report ANZ.
Subscribe to the Newsletter
Recommended for you
Lagavulin’s Excellent New Single Malt Is Both Smoky and Sweet
This peaty 11-year-old single malt was aged entirely in ex-bourbon barrels.
February 9, 2026
Switzerland’s Gstaad Palace Just Gave Its Largest Restaurant an Opulent Makeover
The 112-year-old hotel’s Le Grand gives guests exactly what they want—even if it’s off-menu.
By Tori Latham
January 19, 2026
You may also like.
You may also like.
Mauve on Up
Brisbane boutique stay Miss Midgley’s offers a viscerally human experience—especially if you dig pink.
On a sun-bleached corner of Brisbane’s New Farm, where the scent of frangipani mingles with the clink of coffee cups, stands a building that has lived more lives than most people. Once a premier’s residence, an orphanage, a hospital and a private school, the 160-year-old stone structure now finds itself reborn as Miss Midgley’s—a boutique stay that teaches a masterclass in how to make heritage feel modern.
Designed and run by architect-mother-daughter duo Lisa and Isabella White, Miss Midgley’s captures the cultural confidence of a city in bloom. Nowhere is that new confidence more visible than along James Street—the leafy, slow-burn heart of the city’s fashion and dining scene—where Miss Midgley’s sits quietly at the edge, its shell-pink façade glowing in the subtropical light.
Built of Brisbane’s rare volcanic tuff, the building’s soft mauves and pinks are more than aesthetic; they are its identity. Locals still remember its 1950s incarnation as the Pink Flats, and the Whites have honoured that legacy with a contemporary blush-toned exterior, chosen to harmonise with the stone’s peachy undertones. Inside, those hues continue in dusty terracottas, russets and the faint shimmer of brass tapware. “Design can’t afford to be for the sake of fashion,” Isabella White has said. “It has to respond to what’s in front of you.”
That sentiment is tangible in every corner. Five apartments, each with their own idiosyncratic floor plan, occupy the building. Ceilings bloom with heritage plasterwork, 19th-century wallpaper fragments have been preserved in the kitchens, and tiny hand-painted notes left by the architects point out original quirks: a misaligned beam here, a hidden archway there. It’s a kind of adult treasure hunt for design lovers, where discovery feels personal and unforced.
Even the picket fence, a heritage requirement, has been reimagined in corten steel—a sly nod to regulation turned into sculpture. It’s this blend of reverence and rebellion that gives Miss Midgley’s its edge: heritage without starch, nostalgia without sentimentality.
True to Brisbane’s easy elegance, luxury here is measured not in marble or minibar but in proportion, privacy, and personality. Each apartment—from the Drawing Room and the Assembly Hall to the Principal’s Office—is a self-contained sanctuary with its own kitchen, large bathroom and outdoor space. The ground-floor units open onto leafy courtyards and welcome small dogs; upstairs, the larger suites spill onto verandahs shaded by jacarandas.
At the heart of the property lies a solar-heated pool hemmed with tropical greenery and fringed umbrellas—more mid-century Palm Springs than colonial Brisbane. Around it, guests share a petite laundry, a communal library and that rarest of urban luxuries: a car park per apartment. The atmosphere is quietly collegiate—a handful of travellers who might nod to each other on the stairs but otherwise inhabit their own creative bubbles.
The hotel’s namesake, Annie Midgley, lends the project both its name and its spirit. An ambidextrous artist and teacher, she famously instructed two students at once, writing with both hands simultaneously—a fitting metaphor for the dual vision the Whites bring to the building: one hand rooted in history, the other sketching toward the future. “Not famous, yet known,” goes the property’s understated tagline—and indeed, Miss Midgley’s has quietly become that most desirable of addresses: the one whispered about by people who know.
Sustainability isn’t an accessory here; it’s structural. The adaptive reuse of the heritage building is its boldest environmental act. Solar panels power the property; an electric heat pump warms the pool; recycled decking and tiles frame the courtyard. The metre-thick tuff walls regulate temperature naturally, and the amenities follow suit—refillable bath products, biodegradable pods, Seljak blankets spun from textile off-cuts, and compendiums wrapped in Australian-made kangaroo leather. It’s slow luxury in the truest sense.
In a world of carbon-copy hotels, Miss Midgley’s feels deeply human—a place where history isn’t curated behind glass but lives in the warmth of stone and the flicker of afternoon light. The lesson it offers is simple and resonant: that the most elegant modernity often comes not from reinvention, but from listening to what’s already there.
You may also like.
My Brisbane…Monique Kawecki
The Queensland capital is carving its own distinctive take on Australian culture. Here, a clued-up local aesthete takes us around town.
It’s almost a given that all globally minded creatives will, at some juncture in their careers, choose a path that leads directly to one of the planet’s vital cultural hubs—metropolises with the cosmopolitan thrum of New York, the lofty elegance of Paris, the futuristic edge of Tokyo.
True to form, Monique Kawecki’s work odyssey transported her to the buzz of London for over a decade, but the editor and creative consultant now admits to “finding a balance” in Brisbane, using the Queensland capital as a base for generating international content. Together with her husband, industrial designer Alexander Lotersztain, she’s proud to call the fast-blooming city her home.
Driven by curiosity, Monique joins the dots between creative communities and helps bring visionary projects to life through her studio Champ Creative, a space she runs with her twin sister in Tokyo. Her work as co-founder and editorial director of Ala Champ Magazine, a print-turned-digital-media platform rooted in design, architecture and creative culture, allies thinkers and makers who are shaping the future.
EAT
Central
Step underground and you’ll find more than just a Hong Kong-inspired eatery. This vibrant enclave in the CBD is the vision of chef Benny Lam and young restaurateur David Flynn, combining an avant-garde space—designed by up-and-coming J.AR Office—with inventive Asian-fusion plates and a curated Chinese and Australian wine list. Every detail, from the menu to the disco-era soundscape, combines for a memorable experience.
Gerards
A restaurant that has long held its place among Brisbane’s primo venues, and its makeover by J.AR Office has confirmed it is a mainstay in the city. Rich, rammed-earth textures and sleek steel set the stage for the Levantine-inflected fare, where Queensland produce meets Middle Eastern tradition—all served on textured Sally Kerkin tableware that casts the eclectic dishes in an even more visually pleasing light.
DRINK
+81 Aizome Bar
Inspired by the hidden cocktail bars in Tokyo’s Ginza district, an intimate, indigo-hued 10-seater designed by Alexander Lotersztain. The dimly lit space presents drinks served over hand-cut Japanese ice and expertly crafted “neo cocktails” courtesy of mixologist Tony Huang. Champ Creative curated and sourced the artisan-made tableware and glassware from Japan, making sure the experience is as authentic as possible.
Bar Miette
Overlooking the Brisbane River, Australian chef Andrew McConnell has enlisted executive chef Jason Barratt to direct two of his standout dining ventures—this venue and Supernormal—on the waterfront at 443 Queen Street. Both offer stellar dining—the milk bun with mortadella and smoked maple syrup is simple yet sublime—but this is the spot to visit for a glass of wine accompanied by water vistas.
ART & CULTURE
QAGOMA
Together, the Queensland Art Gallery (QA) and Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) form Australia’s largest modern and contemporary art gallery. Roosting on Brisbane’s South Bank, the establishment showcases exemplary art from Australia, Asia and the Pacific, and, as such, has become a firm favourite among both locals and tourists. By day, world-class exhibitions such as Danish artist Olafur Eliasson’s Presence—beginning December 6th—take centre stage; after dark, expect illuminated theatrics as GOMA permanently projects an intense, multi-hued James Turrell artwork onto its facade.
SHOP
BrownHaus
The experience of entering the luxurious, travertine-clad space is as beautiful as the creations the jewellery studio constructs. The culmination of founder Drew Brown’s 25 years of refining his craft, fine jewels and elevated everyday pieces for both men and women captivate your gaze, each example formed with the utmost intention and care. Moreover, Brown is redefining traditional artisanship and service in a new, modern way, ensuring the flagship store is accessible and exciting in equal measure.
James Street Precinct
For shopping, dining or even just perfecting the time-honoured art of people-watching, James Street is a one-stop hub where fashion, cinema, design and dining converge in Fortitude Valley. Wandering through the streets, discovering fresh, and established, ventures is a cinch. Restaurants sAme sAme and Biànca (from the team behind Agnes and the new Idle bakery) are hard to pass up; next door, be prepared to queue for a cone at Gelato Messina. A recent arrival to the zone is Heidi Middleton’s Artclub atelier, while Australian tailoring brand P. Johnson recently launched its new store, designed by the renowned Tamsin Johnson, across from The Calile hotel.
WELLNESS
The Bathhouse Albion
In Brisbane is home to multiple wellness centres in which one can work out or unwind, such as the five-floor, $80 million TotalFusion Platinum Newstead. This facility, designed by architectural practice Hogg & Lamb, presents a more serene, temple-like experience in the once-industrial Albion Fine Trades district, delivering a communal yet luxe bathhouse with spa, cold plunge, sauna, float, and steam room. With a separate area for hydration spruiking organic TeaGood loose-leaf teas, an hour session ensures a restorative reset.
DAY TRIP
Lady Elliot Island
Visiting one of the most pristine sections of the Great Barrier Reef in one day from Brisbane? Yes, it is indeed possible—and in style, too. With an early start from Redcliffe, around 40 minutes’ drive from the city, take a 90-minute flight to the 45-hectare island and then indulge in a glass-bottom boat viewing, an island tour, and a guided snorkel where you will swoon over mesmerising coral and other-worldly marine life. Lunch is included.
You may also like.
Tropical Storm
Brisbane’s design-led renaissance is gathering momentum and redefining the city as a destination of distinction.
When it comes to the question of which Australian city can claim to be the country’s epicentre of cool, it’s always been a two-horse race between you-know-who. But challengers to the municipal hegemony do periodically raise their heads above the cultural parapet: Hobart has the world-class MONA in its corner; Perth flexes its white-sand beaches and direct flights to London; plucky Canberra enduringly punches above its weight, wielding a Pollock masterpiece or two at the National Gallery. Now, Brisbane— for decades ironically nicknamed “BrisVegas” as a jibe at its lack of places to see and be seen—is ready to assert itself as a serious contender to break the Sydney-Melbourne monopoly.
The Queensland capital is booming, buzzing and bougier than ever. In the past twelve months alone, Brisbane has seen the addition of $80 million ultra-luxe members’ wellness club TotalFusion Platinum, and earned a place on Condé Nast Traveller’s Hot List for hosting the second outpost of Andrew McConnell’s renowned restaurant Supernormal—both designed by Sydney-based multidisciplinary studio ACME. Since the latter’s opening, the upscale dining scene in the CBD—once steeped in starched white-tablecloth tradition—has come into its own with high-concept, slick and scene-y establishments you’ve likely already seen on Instagram.
Among them is Central, named Australia’s best-designed space at this year’s Interior Design Awards. The subterranean late-night dumpling-bar-meets-disco, designed by one-to-watch local firm J.AR Office, is bathed in bright white light and features a DJ booth built into the open, epicentral kitchen. A 10-minute walk along the river towards the Botanic Gardens reveals Golden Avenue, a buzzy collaboration between J.AR Office and Anyday, the Brisbane hospitality group behind some of the city’s most beloved restaurants of the last decade (Biànca, hôntô, sAme sAme, and Agnes). A skylit oasis where palm fronds cast slivers of shade over tiled tables laden with bowls of baba ganoush and clay pots of blistered prawns, the Middle Eastern-inspired eatery feels like Queensland’s answer to Morocco’s walled courtyard gardens.
That design-forward premises anchor much of the buzz around Brisbane’s new pulse points should come as no surprise. After all, this is an urban centre whose perception and personality were transformed in the 2010s by the brutalist breeze-block facades of the then-burgeoning James Street Precinct. Financed by local developers the Malouf family, and designed by Brisbane’s architecture power couple Adrian Spence and Ingrid Richards, the zone has become a desirable, nationally recognised address for flashy flagships and big-name boutiques (just ask Artclub’s Heidi Middleton and The New Trend’s Vanessa Spencer, who each unveiled plush piled-carpet stores along the strip in October).
But it wasn’t until the 2018 opening of The Calile Hotel that Brisbane truly shed its “big country town” image, staking its claim on the international stage. The Palm Springs-inflected urban resort—which, by now, surely needs no introduction—landed 12th in 2023’s inaugural World’s 50 Best Hotels ranking, ahead of Claridge’s and Raffles.
“That was really quite massive for the optics of what Brisbane has to offer the rest of Australia,” says Ty Simon, a born-and-bred Brisbanite and one of the four visionaries behind the Anyday group, along with his details-driven Milanese wife Bianca, executive chef Ben Williamson, and financial backer Frank Li. From that point on, the use of elite architects and designers became de rigueur across the enclave, weaving a sense of permanence into the local fabric. “We believe in what’s happening here,” says Marie-Louise Theile, creative director of the James Street Initiative and PR executive behind many of the city’s primo spots. “And we’re digging in.”
For in-demand Australian interior designer Tamsin Johnson, the mastermind behind some of James Street’s most carefully curated properties—including her husband Patrick Johnson’s P. Johnson Femme showroom, which opened in September—this momentum is “a wonderful thing”. Idle, Johnson’s August-launched first project with Anyday, is a prime example of what she calls a “contemporary sleekness” that feels intrinsic to the new mood taking hold in Brisbane. A modern-day answer to Milan’s 140-year-old gourmet emporium Peck, the site is a study in how mixed materials—glass, concrete, stainless steel and terrazzo—can create a sense of freshness with a 20th-century overtone.
It’s this dialogue between old and new, so intrinsic to Johnson’s work, that makes Brisbane such a compelling canvas for the Melbourne-born, Sydney-based creative. “I think Brisbane is striving hard for its own identity and voice in Australia, and it is clearly working,” she says. For Johnson, that evolution is also “a process of recognising what you have”, a nod to the strong bones the city has to work with and revisit. From the airy stilted Queenslanders to GOMA’s riverside glass pavilion and the subtropical modernism of Donovan Hill’s landmark C House, Brisbane’s design heritage is a quiet yet potent force, infused with what Johnson calls “the subtle memory of bucolic Australia”. Brisbane’s best contemporary architecture reflects what Richards and Spence described when designing The Calile as “a gentle brutalism”. It incorporates the style’s characteristic heaviness—concrete, rigid geometry and cavernous interiors—but, in response to the climate, does away with barriers between outside and in, and welcomes light, air and a feeling of weightlessness that creates spaces that feel open, relaxed and intimately connected to their surroundings.
Johnson will explore this language further in Anyday’s most ambitious venture yet: a four-level dining destination within the colonial-era Coal Board Building, just across from Golden Avenue. Its debut concept The French Exit—a wood-panelled brasserie with half-height curtains and a 2.00 am licence—is set to be unveiled by year’s end, ensuring the once-sleepy heart will beat well into the early hours.
Luring big names to lend the city their cool factor for one-off projects is one thing, but perhaps the most profound sign that Brisbane still bursts with promise is the fact that so many creative forces are choosing to stay, rather than take their talent elsewhere. “I never thought I’d still be in Brisbane,” laughs J.AR Office director Jared Webb, a local-for-life who started the firm in Fortitude Valley in 2022 after a decade spent working under Richards and Spence. “Trying to entice people to stay and see Brisbane as a city to live in, and to visit, is a big undertone of all our work on a much broader scale,” says Webb, whose designs rely heavily on steel, concrete and stone, both as a means to temper the tropical climate and evoke an aura of continuity he believes Brisbane’s built environment has lacked. (Once dubbed the demolition capital of Australia, the municipality lost more than 60 historic buildings during the ’70s and ’80s under former Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, whose two-decade rule was recently revisited in a dramatised documentary available to stream on Stan).
Translating Brisbane’s current buzz into something lasting seems to weigh on the minds of many of the city’s creatives. Vince Alafaci, who forms one half of ACME with his partner Caroline Choker, shares this sentiment when reflecting on their design for Supernormal. “It’s about creating spaces that evolve with time, not ones that date,” he says. “We wanted every element to feel timeless—grounded, honest and enduring.” That pursuit of longevity is something Tamsin Johnson recognises, too: “It’s the people pushing for it that excite me the most. They’re committed,” she says, reflecting on the city’s creative ambition. “I think our designers, the most committed ones, want to leave landmarks and character, bucking against the trend of mundane, short-term and artless developments that all our capitals have experienced. And perhaps Brisbane is leading this mentality.”
You may also like.
Holiday Gift Guide
The supreme Christmas wish-list awaits—maximum impact guaranteed.
Consider this your definitive shortcut to Christmas morning triumph. From museum-grade jewellery to objects of quiet obsession, this is a wish-list calibrated for maximum impact and minimal guesswork. Each piece in this round-up earns its place not through novelty, but through craft, heritage and that elusive quality collectors recognise instantly: desire with staying power. There are icons reimagined (Piaget’s Andy Warhol watch, a masterclass in pop-era permanence), feats of mechanical bravado (Jacob & Co.’s globe-trotting tourbillon), and indulgences that turn ritual into theatre—whether that’s a Hibiki 21 poured just so, or a Rolls-Royce picnic staged like a state occasion. Fashion, design, fragrance and fine drinking are all represented, but united by a single premise: these are gifts that signal intention. The kind that linger on the mantelpiece, wrist or memory long after the wrapping paper is cleared. The stocking at robbreport.com.au, as ever, is generously—and ingeniously—stuffed.
[main image, top] Tiffany & Co. Blue Book Collection Shell Green Tourmaline Brooch, POA; tiffany.com
Top Tip
Montegrappa limited edition 007 Special Issue fountain pen, $2,850, at The Independent Collective; theindependentcollective.com
Clear Winner
Alchemica ‘Transparent’ glass decanter, $1,000; artemest.com
Holding Court
Celine Halfmoon Soft Triomphe lambskin bag, $5,500; celine.com
Beauty and the Feast
Rolls-Royce picnic hamper, $59,676; rolls-roycemotorcars.com
Minutes of Fame
Piaget limited-edition Andy Warhol Watch Collage with 18-carat yellow gold caseback, $128,000; piaget.com
Fancy That
Graff High Jewellery fancy intense yellow oval, white oval and round diamond necklace, POA; kennedy.com.au
Momentos in Time
Christopher Boots Thalamos Keepsake trinket box, $859; christopherboots.com
Strapper’s Delight
Roger Vivier La Rose Vivier sandals in satin, $2,620; rogervivier.com
Sun Kings
Rimowa x Mykita Visor MR005 Aviator Sunshield, $940; rimowa.com
Take Your Best Shot
Hibiki 21 Year Old blended whisky, $1,399; kentstreetcellars.com.au
Making Perfect Scents
Creed Aventus, $559; creedperfume.com.au
Earth Hour
Jacob & Co. The World is Yours Dual Time Zone Tourbillon, $464,750; inspire@jacobandco.com.au
Glass Acts
Fferrone May coupe, $445 (set of two); spacefurniture.com
Fferrone May flute, $375 (set of two); spacefurniture.com
Worth the Wait
Masterson 2018 Shiraz. $1,000; available to order from the Peter Lehmann Cellar Door by calling (08) 8565 9555.
You may also like.
Radek Sali’s Wellspring of Youth
The wellness entrepreneur on why longevity isn’t a luxury—yet—and how the science of living well became Australia’s next great export.
Australian wellness pioneer Radek Sali is bringing his bold vision for longevity and human performance to the Gold Coast this weekend with Wanderlust Wellspring—a two-day summit running 25-26 October 2025 at the RACV Royal Pines Resort in Benowa. Sali, former CEO of Swisse and now co-founder of the event and investment firm Light Warrior, has long been at the intersection of wellness, business and conscious purpose.
Wellspring promises a packed agenda of global thought leaders in biohacking and longevity, including Sydney-born Harvard researcher David Sinclair, resilience pioneer Wim Hof, performance innovator Dave Asprey and muscle-health expert Gabrielle Lyon. From immersive workshops to diagnostics, tech showcases, and movement classes, Sali aims to make longevity less a niche pursuit for the elite and more an accessible cultural shift for all. Robb Report ANZ recently interviewed him for our Longevity feature. Here is an edited version of the conversation.
You’ve helped bring Wellspring to life at a moment when longevity seems to be dominating the cultural conversation. What drew you personally to this space?
I’ve always been passionate about wellness, and the language and refinement around how we achieve it are improving every day. Twenty years ago, when I was CEO of Swisse, a conference like this wouldn’t have had traction. Today, people’s interest in health and their thirst for knowledge continue to expand. What excites me is that wellness has moved into the realm of entertainment—people want to feel better, and that’s something I’ve always been happy to deliver.
There are wellness retreats, biohacking clinics, medical conferences everywhere. What makes Wellspring different?
Accessibility. A wellness retreat can be exclusive, but Wellspring democratises the experience. Tickets start at just $79, with options up to $1,800 for a platinum weekend pass. That means anyone can learn from the latest thought leaders. Too often in this space, barriers are put up that limit who can benefit from the science of biohacking. We want Wellspring to be for everyone.
You’re not just an organiser, but also an investor and participant in this field. How do you reconcile passion with commercial opportunity?
Any investment I make has to have purpose. Helping people optimise their health has driven me for two decades. It’s satisfying not just as an investor but as an operator—it builds wonderful culture within organisations and makes a real difference to people’s lives. That’s the natural fit for me, and something I want to keep refining.
What signals do you look for in longevity ventures to separate lasting impact from passing fads?
A lot of what we’re seeing now are actually old ideas resurfacing, supported by deeper scientific research. My father was one of the first in conventional medicine to talk about diet causing disease and meditation supporting mental health back in the 1970s. He was dismissed at first, but decades later, his work was validated. That experience taught me to look for evidence-based practices that endure. Today, we’re at a point where great scientists and doctors can headline events like Wellspring—that’s a huge cultural shift.
Longevity now carries a certain cultural cachet—its own insider language and status markers. How important is that to moving the field forward?
Health is our most precious asset, and people have always boasted about their routines—whether it’s going to the gym, doing a detox, or training for a marathon. What’s different now is that longevity practices are gaining mainstream recognition. I see it as something to be proud of, and I want to democratise access so everyone can ride the biohacking wave.
But some argue that for the ultra-wealthy, peak health has become a kind of luxury asset—like a private jet or a competitive edge.
That’s short-sighted. Yes, there are extremes, but most biohacking methods are accessible and inexpensive. Look at the blue zones—their lifestyle practices aren’t costly, yet they lead to long, healthy lives. That’s essential knowledge we should be sharing widely, and Wellspring is designed to do that in an engaging way.
Community is often cited as a key factor in healthspan. How does Wellspring foster that?
Community is at the heart of it. Just as Okinawa thrives on social connection, we want Wellspring to be a regular gathering place where people uplift each other. Ideally, it would become as busy as a Live Nation schedule—but for health and wellness.
Do you worry longevity could deepen class divides?
Class divides exist, and health isn’t immune. But in Australia, we’re fortunate—democracy and a strong equalisation process help maintain quality of life for most. Proactive healthcare, like supplementation and lifestyle changes, isn’t expensive. In fact, it’s cheaper than a daily coffee. That’s why we’re one of the top five longest-living nations. The opportunity is to keep improving by making proactive health accessible to everyone.
Some longevity ventures are described as “hedge-fund moonshots.” Others, like Wellspring, seem grounded in time-tested approaches. Where do you stand?
There’s value in both, but I’m more interested in sensible, sustainable practices. Things like exercise, meditation, and community-driven activities are proven to extend life and improve wellbeing. Technology can support this, but we can’t lose sight of the human elements—connection, balance, and purpose.
Finally, what role can Australia—and Wellspring—play in shaping the global longevity conversation?
The fact that we can put on an event like Wellspring, attract world-leading talent, and already have commitments for future years says a lot. Australia is far away, but that hasn’t stopped great scientists and thinkers from coming. We’ll be here every year, contributing to the global conversation and, hopefully, helping more people extend their healthspan.
