WGW: Soho Goes Private, Reuben Bros Hotel Palm Beach, & Aman Goes Vertical

Miami’s latest moves—from tax cuts to Surfside steals—before the sharks return in November

Cover: Miami skyline in the 1920s. Courtesy of Miami-Dade Public Library, Romer Collection. Photographer was Richard B. Hoit.

On My Mind…

School is starting next week. Everyone is back or coming back to town. Summer was quick and hot. The world feels uncertain, but immense gratitude for our community always grounds me. Whatever is happening out there, it always feels good here.

Living here is a gift. The greatest wealth we have is each other and this extraordinary life. A rising tide raises all boats, if the boats remember they’re rowing in the same direction. As Rumi wrote, “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop.” The strength of our community comes from moving with one another.

That’s why gratitude, presence, and being a positive force isn’t just a mindset, it’s a responsibility. Let’s embrace it every day together.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming, lets get it!

WHAT’S GOOD THIS WEEK

• Beach Business

  • Soho House Goes Private: Being Rich Is Cool, Going Public Is Not

  • Florida Ends Sales Tax on Commercial Rent

  • Reuben Bros & Eden Roc Launching Vineta Hotel in Palm Beach

  • Aman Miami Beach Goes Vertical

  • Ritz Pitches in for Lincoln Road Redevelopment

• Hospitality: Local Insider

  • Planta Closes All South Florida Locations

• Real Estate: Luxe Listings We Love

  • Summer’s Biggest Price Drops & Opportunities

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BEACH BUSINESS

Soho House Goes Private: Being Rich Is Cool, Going Public Is Not

In 2021, Soho House made the ultimate contradiction: a business built on exclusivity, suddenly open to every retail investor with a Robinhood account. The London-based operator of private members’ clubs sold Wall Street a dream that it could scale its ethos of exclusivity into a profitable, publicly traded empire.

It didn’t work.

This week, Soho House agreed to sell itself to a consortium of investors led by MCR Hotels, Apollo Global Management, and Ashton Kutcher at a $2.7 billion valuation. The move effectively takes the company private again, ending a short-lived experiment on the stock market that left its shares down 45% from IPO pricing.

The lesson? Going public is not cool.

Soho House was always more about cultural capital than financial returns. Members weren’t paying thousands of dollars for spreadsheets and quarterly calls; they were paying to drink martinis in a room full of other people who they wanted to be like. Going public turned that proposition inside out. Suddenly, Soho House wasn’t just answering to its tastemakers and creatives, but to analysts demanding perpetual and immediate growth. More houses, more rooms, more expansion, higher margins, all of which inevitably threatens the entire value proposition of the business, exclusivity and creativity on which its brand rested.

This is the paradox of public luxury. Growth is oxygen for Wall Street, but poison for brands that trade on brand equity and scarcity. Name one company that went public and stayed just as culturally relevant and rarefied as it was before. LVMH? Private. Chanel? Private. Hermès? Public, technically, but controlled so tightly by the founding family that it might as well not be.

True exclusivity and brand equity rarely thrives in the quarterly earnings cycle.

Soho House’s critics called it a broken business model. Maybe it was. But its real problem is the contradiction of selling more without losing relevance.

A private club that’s a public stock is no longer private.

Going private doesn’t solve all of its challenges (the $700 million debt still needs tending, and expansion is still in the DNA). But it does restore the one thing it lost when it rang the opening bell in 2021: mystique.

Because for Soho House, the only thing worse than losing money is losing cool.

Florida Kills Sales Tax on Commercial Rents