MIRAI Design District Breaks Ground with $85M Loan as Kengo Kuma’s First U.S. Project

• Lionheart, Leviathan, Well Duo, and The Lane Organization broke ground on MIRAI Design District at 4218 NE Second Avenue.
• Kengo Kuma's first U.S. mixed-use project: 41,000 SF of Class A office, 16,000 SF of retail and hospitality, and a 2,000-SF sculptural "house."
• Berkadia's Scott Wadler and Patrick Johnson, with WD Capital Group, arranged the $85M construction loan from Monroe Capital.
• The team assembled the corner for roughly $25.5M and plans to hold for a decade; completion is targeted for 2028.

Kengo Kuma has designed stadiums, museums, and towers across the globe, and his name sits on the Aman Residences rising in Miami Beach. But the Japanese architect has never delivered a mixed-use project in the United States. MIRAI Design District, now under construction at 4218 Northeast Second Avenue, will be his first.

The project moved forward after developers Lionheart Capital, Leviathan Development, Well Duo, and The Lane Organization secured an $85 million construction loan from Chicago-based Monroe Capital, arranged through WD Capital Group and a Berkadia team led by Scott Wadler and Patrick Johnson. For a ground-up, design-driven building with no leasing track record on the site, that loan is the milestone that lets a project like this leave the ground.

A 65,000-SF "Floating Lantern" on Northeast Second Avenue

The plan is a three-story, roughly 65,000-square-foot building: about 41,000 square feet of Class A office on the second and third floors, split into four trophy-office units, and roughly 16,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, restaurant, and hospitality space carved into 17 modular bays, almost all with corner exposure, that tenants can combine or take singly. A 2,000-square-foot standalone house, designed as a sculptural centerpiece, rounds out the program.

Kuma designed the building as a "floating lantern": a transparent ground floor, a layered façade, and a central garden meant to pull pedestrians in off the street. The firm's signature blend of architecture and landscape shows up in the details: a living green roof with solar panels, operable windows, and a lush interior garden built for al-fresco programming. Landscape architect Island Planning Corporation, led by Nathan Browning, is handling the greenscapes; Italian lighting house Viabizzuno is designing a façade lighting program that will make the building a fixture after dark.

A Corner Assembled Lot by Lot for $25.5M

The site sits at the northeast edge of the Design District and spans three parcels: 4200, 4218, and 4240 Northeast Second Avenue. Lionheart, Leviathan, and Well Duo bought 4200 and 4240 from Miami Design District Associates, the partnership of Craig Robins' Dacra, L Catterton Real Estate, and Brookfield Properties, for $20 million in September 2023. Lionheart picked up the remaining interest in 4218, the building that houses its own headquarters, that October for $5.5 million. That puts the land basis around $25.5 million before construction.

Lionheart founder and CEO Ophir Sternberg said the firm spent years stitching the corner together and sees MIRAI as the trigger for the avenue's next phase. Allison Greenfield, founder and managing partner of Leviathan Development, framed the scarcity bluntly: "The limitation in the Design District has been the lack of square footage, because it's concentrated in so few hands."

The Bet: Boutique Office for Miami's New Money

MIRAI's office space is designed for the firms reshaping Miami: family offices, small and midsize funds, and design-driven companies that want a few floors of highly designed space rather than a tower in Brickell or a warehouse conversion in Wynwood. The developers are wagering that the steady inflow of financial and creative tenants to South Florida will translate into leasing demand for exactly this kind of boutique product. Retail tenants, the team says, will be chosen for design, culture, hospitality, and lifestyle fit rather than the highest bid.

The Design District gives the wager a head start. The neighborhood, anchored by Robins' Dacra, has already transformed from a warehouse strip into one of the country's top luxury retail destinations, and new development is pushing it beyond retail. Kuma is no stranger to the market either, with the 18-story Aman Residences underway in the Faena District for Vlad Doronin's OKO Group and Len Blavatnik's Access Industries.

What's Next

The project was originally supposed to start in summer 2024 and finish by the end of 2025; design revisions, a long entitlement process, and the pursuit of a high-profile anchor tenant pushed it back. Completion is now targeted for 2028, and the development team plans to hold MIRAI for at least a decade. The anchor tenant, whose name it won't reveal yet, may say more about the corridor's trajectory than anything in the renderings.