FORT LAUDERDALE — FAT Village is not dead.
Far from it.
The long-awaited project — expected to make downtown Fort Lauderdale’s Flagler Village even more hip and trendy — is on the rise in the same spot where spirited and cocktailed crowds once strolled through a muraled warehouse district lit up with funky art galleries, good food and live music.
Once built, the new FAT (Food Art Technology) Village will transform the former FAT Village Arts District into a dynamic destination teeming with apartments, bars, restaurants, shops, offices, art studios and galleries.
Here’s what’s coming:
More than 600 apartments will be split between two towers, one with 24 floors standing 270 feet high and the other with 13 floors standing 161 feet high.
A third tower with office space catering to modern young professionals will have six floors and stand 83 feet high.
A fourth tower with 257 apartments and 25 floors would be the tallest tower at 305 feet. The last tower would be built as part of the second phase, but could become a hotel or even a second office tower, depending on the market.
The apartment towers are expected to open by the middle of 2026. The office tower, shops and restaurants would open toward the end of next year.
‘Nucleus of the neighborhood’
Tim Petrillo, one of the developers behind the $500 million project, donned a hard hat on a sweltering Tuesday and peered out at the dusty construction site at Northwest First Avenue, just north of Northwest Fifth Street.
First Avenue, the main street for those lively Fat Village Art Walks, will serve as a walkable main street for the new FAT Village, he said.
“We’re going to stay true to the roots of Flagler Village,” Petrillo told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “Great public art, great street art. We’re going to relaunch the monthly Art Walks. There’s going to be everything from coffee shops and cafes to full-service, high-energy restaurants. FAT Village will become a nucleus of the neighborhood and provide a sense of place for Flagler Village.”
Petrillo and developer Alan Hooper, who together head Urban Street Development, spent years buying up properties in a two-block stretch bounded by North Andrews Avenue on the east and the Florida East Coast Railway to the west, and Northwest Sixth Street (Sistrunk Boulevard) on the north and Northwest Fifth Street on the south.
Eight years ago, Petrillo and Hooper bought the old-school Irish pub, Maguire’s Hill 16. The bar, popular with cops, prosecutors, reporters and politicians, held a wake for itself the last night it was open. Hundreds of regulars showed up to down a mug of Guinness and pay their respects.
“Maguire’s was one of the last ones to go,” Petrillo said. “I think we bought our first parcel 11 years ago. That’s how long it took us to assemble all this land. The very last parcel was a little 120-foot parking lot. Our last holdout. We paid a lot more money than we wanted for it, over $5 million. That was five years ago.”
When they were done buying up all the parcels, they had 5.6 acres of prime land in a downtown that was in the middle of a construction boom.
Project approvals from the city came without much controversy.
Teaming up with global real-estate giant Hines only fueled the momentum, Petrillo said.
‘A village within a village’
The project has gone up quickly since breaking ground in March 2024.
The 13-story tower was topped off this year on March 19. The 24-story tower was next, with a topping off ceremony on May 20 to mark the placement of the tower’s final beam.
The office building isn’t far behind. The topping-off celebration is expected as soon as late August or early September.
“Everyone remarks how fast it’s coming out of the ground,” said Commissioner Steve Glassman, whose district includes the Flagler Village neighborhood. “It’s really taking shape rather quickly.”
Glassman says he still remembers when Hooper stopped by his office six years ago to show him the master plan for the project.
“I loved that they were creating a village within a village,” Glassman told the Sun Sentinel. “It’s going to provide a real neighborhood with retail and our first high-tech office space. Plus coffee shops, restaurants, bars, artists’ galleries, artists’ studios and shops. And it’s going to be in one centralized location. I don’t think we have all that in one development anywhere.”
Fat Village will make a cool place even cooler, says developer Charlie Ladd, a board member on Fort Lauderdale’s Downtown Development Authority.
“Downtown is more than just a bunch of apartments,” Ladd said. “You need other stuff. And they’re bringing that other stuff. You won’t find anything like it in South Florida.”
A timber high-rise
Original plans called for one of the towers to be a hotel. But when Houston-based Hines joined the team, the hotel was scrapped for an office building with Class AA space — top-of-the-line amenities that exceed the standards of Class A. The building will be the region’s first mass-timber office tower, Petrillo says.
It makes perfect sense for the Fort Lauderdale market, according to Ladd.
Here’s why: High-end office space is an amenity Fort Lauderdale is short on.
The Bank of America building on Las Olas opened in early 2003 and only one other office tower has been built since: The Main Las Olas, a mixed-use tower that opened in 2021.
“In the interim, we’ve added 20,000 residents,” Ladd said. “The ground is very fertile here for employers. The office tower at FAT Village is oriented to more forward-thinking corporations like the tech-oriented Googles of the world. Hines is an expert on this.”
Mass timber components are usually prefabricated off-site, which can lead to faster construction times and reduce on-site labor costs.
“Timber is one of our planet’s most rapidly renewable resources,” the Hines company website says. “It also stores carbon rather than emitting it. The responsibly produced timber used for T3 is less energy intensive to extract and process, cleaner and quicker to build with, and produces less waste than concrete and steel.”
Petrillo says he doesn’t think the office building will have any trouble finding tenants.
“It’s really cool,” he said. “You don’t expect to see a timber high-rise in Fort Lauderdale. So we did that instead of the hotel.”
‘That FAT Village DNA’
Petrillo and Hooper have already built four residential projects in Flagler Village: Avenue Lofts, The Foundry Lofts, The Mill Lofts and The Forge Lofts.
FAT Village is their fifth. But of all five projects, Petrillo says FAT Village is the biggest and most prominent — a legacy project.
“This is going to have our fingerprints on it,” he said. “We really want to create something South Florida has not seen. We’re trying to curate our retail to get unique operators that you don’t find in every community. We really want to create a special experience.”
As CEO of the Restaurant People, Petrillo owns several popular restaurants around town and plans to open two more in FAT Village.
“They’ll be side by side,” he said. “One is called PesKa. It’s an ode to seafood. We’re doing it with our longtime chef who came to me three years ago with the idea. We’re still figuring out the other one.”
Doug McCraw and business partner Lutz Hofbauer, founders and co-owners of the FAT Village Arts District, have been partners in the project from the beginning and are playing a key role in curating the art being incorporated in FAT Village.
Once they’re done, FAT Village will be like nothing you’ve seen anywhere in the country, McCraw said.
“It will have that FAT Village DNA,” McCraw told the Sun Sentinel. “The idea from the start was to have a unique arts-centric village that would be something really iconic for Fort Lauderdale and maybe for all of South Florida. I think there’s a uniqueness to FAT Village, even if you look at it on a national basis. It will be a magnet for the neighborhood and for all of Fort Lauderdale.”
‘We’ll be back’
McCraw remembers the controversy that bubbled up when the art district’s warehouses had to close down to make way for the new FAT Village project.
What did he tell all the artists and shop owners who were upset about being displaced?
“We’ll be back,” he said with a soft chuckle. “And I’m still here. We’re still partners in the project. And I meant what I said. Art will be a part of the continuing DNA of FAT Village.”
As a resident of Flagler Village, Phillip Dunlap says he has high hopes for the new project on the rise in his neighborhood.
“In a city with lots of glass towers, there’s a lot of interesting bits of character about the development,” said Dunlap, president of the Flagler Village Civic Association. “I do think from a design standpoint it really ups the game and brings something different. I think they’re focused on creating a lot of energy and buzz. It’s going to create a great hub of activity — and make you feel like you’re in a neighborhood.”
Susannah Bryan can be reached at sbryan@sunsentinel.com. Follow me on X @Susannah_Bryan