A luxury hotel and condominium called The Whitfield is planned on a site just east of downtown Fort Lauderdale, and though the hotel is expected to open in 2027, the site itself is already accommodating the public. Enclosing the site is a temporary purple wall emblazoned with the hotel’s logo in white lettering, and a rigid canopy on top of the wall extends over the sidewalk, shielding pedestrians on East Las Olas Boulevard from the sun and rain.
Indeed, The Whitfield’s developers have five-star aspirations. They say luxury accommodations, now concentrated in Fort Lauderdale’s beach area, are needed downtown, too. “Our goal is to create the top hotel in South Florida,” said Steve Hudson of Hudson Capital Group. “This will be a five-star, luxury hotel that sets the standard for South Florida, not just Fort Lauderdale but Miami and Palm Beach as well.”
Hudson, who’s developing the hotel and condo with Charles B. Ladd Jr., president of Fort Lauderdale-based Barron Real Estate, said they aim to finish construction and open The Whitfield in about two years.
The hotel side of The Whitfield will operate as an independently branded luxury property affiliated with Leading Hotels of the World, a marketing organization that represents hundreds of luxury hotels. The Whitfield brand didn’t emerge from a marketing study or a focus group session. Hudson said the name has been in his family for generations. A nephew of the late billionaire H. Wayne Huizenga, he founded Fort Lauderdale-based Hudson Capital Group in 1997 with his late father, Harris “Whit” Hudson. “My father’s full name was Harris Whitfield Hudson,” he said. “I am Steven Whitfield Hudson … My son is Steven Whitfield Hudson Jr.”
The Whitfield development on the northwest corner of the intersection of Las Olas Boulevard and Southeast 10th Terrace has been years in the making. Hudson and Ladd paid $8.29 million in 2016 for the development site at 1007 E. Las Olas Blvd. through two Florida entities, Mustang Properties and 800 Las Olas, LLC, according to property records. What began as a mid-size hotel development has morphed into an amended site plan for The Whitfield, a boutique hotel and condominium with penthouse condo units priced at $15 million.
Hudson and Ladd decided against building a hotel only as interest rates and construction costs soared following city approval of their original site plan for a 138-room hotel on East Las Olas Boulevard in the spring of 2021. Since then, the total project cost has increased 50 percent, Hudson said without elaboration. Adding condos to the development “is really something we should have done in the beginning,” he said, citing better access to “workable” financing for the development with a condo component.
Pre-construction prices for the condos range from $3.7 million to $15 million. “These condos are going to have a private entrance and a private elevator, as opposed to some of the larger condo-hotels on the beach,” he said. The condos will serve solely as private residences and won’t be rented as suites along with The Whitfield’s hotel rooms, which will be as pricey as the condos. Hudson said he and Ladd expect their hotel to command daily room rates in the $800 to $900 range.
Hudson and Ladd believe many of The Whitfield’s potential condo buyers will be local owners of suburban houses or local renters in apartment buildings substantially bigger than their 12-story boutique development. “One [prospect] is coming out of a rental downtown. That’s a much larger building, and he doesn’t want to wait for the elevator anymore,” Hudson said. “With the amenities that a five-star, ultraluxury hotel provides – I’m not saying they’ll be selling like hotcakes, but we shouldn’t have a problem getting the condos sold.”
After winning site-plan approval from city officials for a 10-story hotel in 2021, Hudson and Ladd redesigned their development as a 12-story building with fewer hotel rooms – 81 instead of 138 – and 17 condominium units on the upper floors. The Fort Lauderdale City Commission on January 7 unanimously approved the amended site plan for the revamped building, designed with five condo units each on the 8th, 9th and 10th floors and two penthouse units on the 11th floor. The 12th-floor design features a pool, cabanas, a café and two private dining rooms. Second-floor amenities will include a restaurant and a library, and a spa will serve as the third floor’s centerpiece.
Part of The Whitfield’s construction is already done. Crews finished building an underground parking garage in early 2024, Hudson said, but by then, he and Ladd had decided to hold off on further construction because higher interest rates had inflated borrowing costs. The purple wall at the development site obscures the subterranean parking garage, an unusual garage designed without a ramp. Valets will transport cars to and from the garage on two elevators. “We’re limited in height to only 150 feet, so it necessitated parking below ground for us to keep the profile of the hotel down,” Hudson said. “Otherwise, this hotel would be sitting on a massive [above-ground] podium, and not only that— we would lose two floors of rooms.”
