GlobeSt.com UPDATE: Shangri-La Joins Westin at Flagstone's Island Gardens

MIAMI-Hong Kong-based Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts will open its second US property here in Island Gardens, the $480-million mixed-use resort under development on Watson Island by locally based Flagstone Property Group. This comes one day after Shangri-La unveiled plans for a condo hotel in Chicago’s Waterview Tower and two days after Flagstone announced that Starwood would open a 350-unit Westin hotel in Island Gardens.

The Shangri-La fills in a blank in the master-planned Island Gardens project for which the City of Miami awarded Flagstone a 75-year ground lease. The plan calls for dual hotels as its centerpiece. While the Westin will be a conventional hotel, the Shangri-La will include 147 conventional rooms, 12 of which are one- and two-bedroom poolside villas, and 105 units that will be sold as fractionals, each marketed in seven fractions as second homes to periodic visitors.

The 135 hotel rooms will span floors one through 14, with the fractional ownership units on floors 15 through 42. The Shangri-La property will contain an Asian-inspired restaurant, screening room, a business center and green room available to VIPs and brides, according to a company statement. The hotel is scheduled to open in 2008.Calls to Mehmet Bayraktar, chairman and CEO of Flagstone, were not returned by deadline.