5 Questions With Craig Collin of Tavistock Development

Tavistock Development Company is best known for its massive Lake Nona development in Orlando, Fla., but the company also has tackled a major project in South Florida.

In 2016, Tavistock bought Pier Sixty-Six, the iconic hotel and marina in Fort Lauderdale. In 2017, Hurricane Irma damaged the property, and it was closed for years.

But Pier Sixty-Six has reopened. Rotating rooftop restaurant Pier Top, in disrepair for years, is moving again.

Craig Collin, president and chief operating officer of Tavistock Development, spoke to Commercial Observer about the project.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Commercial Observer: You’ve been remaking a prominent property. What’s the vision for the renovated Pier Sixty-Six?

Craig Collin: It’s 325 hotel rooms, just over 40,000 square feet of meeting space, too many restaurants to put into words. There are 10 or 12 ways to get yourself fed at Pier Sixty-Six. There are 80 condos we’ve started to sell, starting at $4.5 million. We focused on the hotel renovation first. We always felt when we opened the hotel, the hotel would help sell the residences.

What was your biggest challenge with Pier Sixty-Six?

It was a lot of development in a very small area. And we were opening up a building that was built in the 1960s and trying to figure out, “What were they doing?” That was especially the case with Pier Top – we had to make it rotate again.

How did you get the rotating top floor to move again?

It was really opening it up to figure out how they were engineering this to move. Then we had to understand there were no standard parts. There were all these bespoke parts that we had to have made. It’s a very intricate system, and in theory hard to get to to maintain. 

I’ve never put a stopwatch to this, but it’s intended to rotate once every 66 minutes. By the time we acquired the property, it was moving a little bit. At no point were we not going to make this thing turn. It held way too many memories. 

People say, “I had my wedding there.” “I had my bar mitzvah there.” When people see the finished product at Pier Top – to really bring it back to its original glory – they’re going to love it. 

Pier Sixty-Six operated as a Hyatt for decades, but it’s running as an independent hotel now.

It’s no longer a branded hotel. There’s so much brand recognition with Pier Sixty-Six – in Fort Lauderdale, throughout Florida, in the Northeast and Midwest. We always felt we could leverage the brand name, the brand recognition. 

In the short time we’ve been open, we’ve seen that the draw of the name is strong enough. It definitely is more work in terms of managing group bookings. There is a lot of effort, and our in-house team ends up doing a lot of work.

For guests coming back, how are the new Pier Sixty-Six rooms and facilities different from what they’re used to?

It is a modern aesthetic, with an acknowledgement of a very historic past. That’s what really draws it together. We could not draw a blind eye to the history of the project, because that was going to make us successful. We kept the banyan tree that everyone remembers. The banyan tree now sits in the middle of the drive-up.

Jeff Ostrowski can be reached at jostrowski@commercialobserver.com.