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Condominium's
Interior Designer, Bonet & Associates,
wins Multifamily Residential Project Forum
Award
MIAMI (December 6,
2004) The 199-unit Neo Lofts was the center of attention
at this year's Forum Design Awards, as the condominium's
interior designer, Bonet & Associates
International LLC, won the Multifamily Residential
Project Forum Award for best design awarded by the
International Interior Design Association (IIDA).
This year's competition yielded winners in seven
categories with the design concept for Neo Lofts beating
out entrants in its category such as the Flamingo South
Beach on Miami Beach and the Crystal Plaza in Arlington,
Virginia. The Miami-based design firm submitted their
work for Neo Lofts, in which they imparted a minimalist
Industrial chic look in line with traditional loft
styling. Conrad Bonet, a licensed interior designer with
a Masters in Architecture from Texas A&M University,
incorporated soothing colors, linens, cork and woods
into the public spaces and added unique elements such as
river rocks in the lobby area and bamboo in the spa.
Bonet established a unique look by combining classic
features and natural materials with concrete, metals and
exposed ducts appealing to the trendsetting, hip
audience I targeted, in addition to the distinguished
members of the industry who bestowed this honor upon him
and this project, stated Developer Lissette
Calderon of Neo Concepts LLC. Bonet &
Associates is a full-service interior design firm
with offices in Costa Rica
and Miami.Founded in 2000, the company employs a
talented team of 12 and has been involved with numerous
retail, restaurant and high-end residential projects.
The Forum Design Awards is an annual awards ceremony
sponsored by the Florida chapter of IIDA, which
recognizes outstanding design in several categories.
This year marks the seventh year that the Florida
Chapter has held its Forum Design Awards. The IIDA is a
professional networking and educational association of
more than 10,000 members. The organization is
committed to enhancing the quality of life through
excellence in interior design and advancing
interior design through
knowledge. Located on the south bank of the Miami River,
Neo Lofts is the first condominium of its kind in the
area and has spurred a trend of loft developments around
Miami. Residents enjoy open spaces, state-of-the-art
appliances and resort-style amenities
including a rooftop infinity edge pool, an urban garden
retreat, oriental soaking bath, and a dog park.
Neo Lofts was marketed, sold and completed within 18
months. Calderon is also developing two other projects
on the Miami River, Neo Vertika, a
Splits-style condominium, and in association with the
Epoch Corporation, Wind by Neo, a Kinetic Condominium
in Miami�s only Downtown
Enclave, River Front. Neo Concepts LLC is located at
3375 SW 3rd Avenue in Miami.
Lissette
Calderon’s next concept: motherhood
Neo Concepts chief pioneers new lofts in Miami, has more
projects in works
First came Neo
Lofts. Then came marriage. Next comes Mia in baby
carriage. Neo Concepts chief executive Lissette
Calderon’s latest creation is due in February. Mia will
be her first real baby. With a hand gesture indicating
she’s delivering a baby, she says she
considers Neo Lofts condominium tower on the Miami River
to be her child. Her 135-pound dog, Zeus, a combination
of mastiff and St. Bernard breeds, is like another
offspring. “He’s like a St. Bernard with its hair shaved
off,” says the proud mother-tobe,
who rushes off to grab a color photo of the white-furred
giant that’s taped to the wall in her tiny office. The
baby girl will be named for her mother, Maria Calderon,
who is
also Lissette’s partner in the 5-year-old development
company. Maria is also president of Neo Realty, the
in-house brokerage that will generate $45 million in
revenue this year.
Mother and daughter started Neo with a “sizable” sum
they made from the condo conversion of Sunset Palm
Villas, a 268-unit residential townhouse community in
North Miami. The more than $100 million Wind, her next
residential project on the Miami River, contributed to
the brokerage’s revenue this year. The 489-unit project,
slated to start
construction next summer, is already 80 percent sold
after a little more than 30 days on the market. Units in
the 41-story building range from 785 square feet for
$200,000 to
1,617 square feet for $650,000. The most expensive units
at Neo Vertika, which are expected to be available in
April 2006, sold for $400,000. With Neo Lofts, Calderon
earned respect for pioneering the west side of the Miami
River, a strategy “few people
were interested in,” said Philip Spiegelman, chief
executive of International Sales Group.
“Neo Vertika, the second building, was a smart and well
thought out follow up to her success. It appears to be a
real project that she is moving forward with. That
separates the women and the men from the boys in this
marketplace,” Spiegelman said.
He cautioned, however, that the jury is still out on
whether the “loft style,” which evolved out of large
volume warehouses, will work long term. “This is a
reinterpretation of the loft idea in a small space,”
Spiegelman said. “I’m not convinced that the market has
endorsed that kind of living as a lifestyle. That will
be an interesting story a year or two
from now when enough of these buildings have been
built.” Dan Kodsi, president of Royal Palm Communities,
which is developing the Paramount project north of
downtown Miami, said he doesn’t know anything about her
revenue or whether she has made a profit, but said she
has proven she can deliver. “The development business is
a tough business, from land acquisition, to approval all
the way through selling and delivery, and
she’s done all of it. My hat’s off to her,” Kodsi said.
“She did it, and the proof’s in the pudding. My
perception is she is making things happen.” Wind is a
return to familiar territory for Calderon and, in some
ways, a departure. It’s familiar territory because it’s
on the river, the artery that fed Neo Lofts and Neo
Vertika before it. The project is pet friendly with
rules that allow animals larger than 20 pounds, now a
Neo trademark.
Calderon has also continued her Neo branding scheme,
giving the project the name Wind by Neo Epoch. It’s a
brand and identity she’s defending legally. She recently
filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Miami alleging
that an architect and Fort Lauderdale-based developer
copied the design and floor plan of Neo Vertika. She is
credited with pioneering the loft concept in Miami. And
her latest project, Wind, incorporates innovative
design: each unit has an “exo-room,” an 11-foot-deep
balcony like area intended as an outdoor extension of
the indoor living area. She told Coral Gables-based
architect Luis Revuelta that the exo-room should have
enough room for a sofa, a table and chairs, and he
figured out how deep it needed to be. The project is a
bit of a departure for Calderon. It’s her first
multibuilding project. It’s part of a development
on the 13.5 acres Neo shares with Inigo Ardid of
Miami-based Key International. On the same site, Ardid
is developing three residential buildings, including the
504-unit Ivy, and an office building. And in another
change, Calderon took on a project partner, Tony
Cabrera, whose Epoch Corp. is contributing the property.
Another collaborator is Revuelta, who has been
commissioned — Calderon calls him an artist — to design
the
six residential buildings. Calderon attributes her
penchant for pushing herself in part to her experience
at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania,
where she graduated cum laude in 1996 with triple
concentrations in real estate, finance and multinational
management. Her classmates voted her as one of four
outstanding
women in a graduating class of more than 4,000. She is
also motivated by her
mentors, Related Group’s Jorge Perez and Adolfo
Henriquez. Calderon was an assistant to Henriquez when
he headed the former NationsBank (now Bank of America)
during the summer of 1994. She describes that time as
being one of the most important in learning the
intangibles — “what kind of person I wanted to be and
how I wanted to treat the people around me.” She was a
project manager at Related, again part of an elite
group, “owners” as Perez calls them. She managed
architects, engineers and general Contractors. She also
helped design and budget several projects, including the
conversion of the historic Congress Building into 123
rental units and construction of the Gables Grand Plaza,
a 195-unit condo project with 35,000 square feet of
retail. She says she always looked forward to Perez’s
visits. “It was always an incredible experience when he
came to the site,” Calderon recalls. “I always watched
what he looked for and
what he was doing, and his visions for the projects.”
The project-manager model used
at Related will be copied at the new Neo offices at 1637
SW Eighth St. in Little Havana. She’s moving the
16-person operation from 940 square feet off Coral Way
to a 7,700-square-foot warehouse that used to store
beauty supplies. Instead of working at a 2-foot by
3-foot desk as she does now, Calderon says, she’ll have
a “comfortable” office. There will be room enough for
project managers, as the company looks into possibly
expanding into eastern Broward County, Tampa,
Jacksonville and other parts of the Miami River.
Calderon, who is known for working 16-hour days, is also
building a nursery next to her offices so that she can
see her daughter, “take her on strolls” and “see her
grow up.” “I’m trying to have it all,” Calderon says.
“I’m trying to do the best that I can. I am at a
position in my life that I can try to do that. “So
between conference calls or meetings, if I have 20
minutes to take a stroll with my daughter and see her,
I’d like to take advantage of that. Before I know it,
she will be grown up and wearing a hard hat
and an HP calculator.” Oscar Pedro Musibay can be
reached at
omusibay@floridabiz.
Posted on Mon, Oct.
06, 2003
SoHo's style in the heart of Miami
Miami, meet downtown Manhattan
When she was 22, Lissette Calderon moved back to Miami
and felt like a demographic ignored.
The one-time investment banker wanted to live in a hip
downtown apartment like the SoHo loft she rented with a
friend in Manhattan, but that sort of thing didn't
exist. ''There was nothing that I really liked, that I
found exciting and sexy,'' Calderon, now 29, said.
``Some of the things I did find that were exciting and
sexy were out of my reach.'' So she did something
unexciting and un-sexy: She moved in with her mother.
But a bit later, she pioneered a trend that's swept
through South Florida's real estate industry. At a time
when Miami was struggling to attract residential
builders and two -bedrooms were the gold standard for
highrise buildings, this neophyte developer launched the
21-story Neolofts on the gritty shoreline of the Miami
River. Strong sales there before the groundbreaking last
May were some of the first sparks in Miami's current
residential boom, and developers as far north as Fort
Lauderdale have latched onto the loft concept as a way
to sell their buildings on iffy urban lots.
''In Miami, they were the first ones who did [lofts] in
a significant way,'' said developer Willy Bermello.
``And in a gutsy location.''
`ARE YOU CRAZY?' Calderon's father, Rafael, was a real
estate developer who died when she was 17. She and her
mother, Maria Calderon,
tapped into the money left after his death for NEO.
Calderon said it wasn't easy pitching investors on the
project. 'People said, `You're building a condo with no
walls -- are you crazy?' '' Calderon recalled. (Fannie
Mae ultimately put in $5.5 million as part of its urban
renewal program,
with Wachovia loaning the bulk of the construction
costs.)
SURPRISE CAREER
Real estate was not Calderon's first choice. After
graduating from Wharton business school in 1996, she
worked as an investment banker in New York, where she
``was making a lot of money and really kind of living
what I always thought was the investment banker life.''
She was also miserable.
''At the end of the day, I was not a very happy
person,'' Calderon said. She found her job -- analyzing
potential stock offerings in Latin America --
challenging, but not rewarding.
''Is this a good tire
factory? How exciting can that be?'' she said. ``You go
and do your IPO, and at the end of the day it's
successful. But there's really nothing there to touch.''
So she quit her job after a year, moved back to Miami,
and went to work for developers -- first with Terremark,
and
then with Related Group. In 2000 she quit to start Neo
Concepts, the development company she and her mother own
with a third partner, Frank Guerra.
ATTRACTING YOUTH
Given the lack of downtown projects, she thought even a
faux loft building -- not the standard warehouse
conversion, but a new high rise -- would entice a young,
stylish corps of buyers eager to live in the heart of
the city. The 199 Neo units started at about $110,000
and topped out at $450,000, and will have 11-foot
ceilings, exposed ducts, balconies, concrete floors and
oversized windows -- but no bedrooms, even for the
1,200-square-foot corner units. ''All along I knew the
project had to be loft. It had to be creative,'' she
said. ``That way people could really design it.'' Neo
lofts will finish in January, and Calderon is busy
selling her second project: Neo Vertika, a pricier
building on the river that's upgraded the loft concept
by adding a second level to the units, and putting
retail on the ground floor. She's upgraded the prices
too, with the cheapest two-tier apartments starting at
$170,000. Why isn't ''loft'' in Neo-Vertika's name? ''We
wanted to kind of differentiate ourselves,'' Calderon
said. ``So many of these lofts were coming. We said: OK,
let's move on.''
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