The former Celino South Beach: acquisition, Curio Collection conversion and the uncontested foreclosure

The former Celino is an art-deco property on Miami Beach, acquired in 2021 during the acquisitive phase and announced with plans to reopen under Hilton’s Curio Collection, the brand Hilton uses for individually distinctive hotels that keep their own identity while gaining access to its reservation system and loyalty programme.

That fit the asset well. An art-deco building on Miami Beach has exactly the character Curio is designed for: it cannot be made to look like a chain hotel and would lose value if it were. The conversion gave it distribution without erasing what made it worth buying.

It also gave the portfolio two Hilton-affiliated hotels carrying the Gabriel name in the same metropolitan area. The naming is a persistent source of confusion in coverage, and this record keeps the two apart deliberately: this page is the South Beach property, and the downtown hotel is its own file.

Established: the property was acquired in 2021, reopened under the Curio Collection, and passed to its lender through a foreclosure over a reported $69 million balance that the borrower did not defend, as Bisnow reported in July 2025. Those facts appeared in contemporaneous coverage and are the basis of this entry.

Not established, and therefore not asserted: the precise legal instrument, why the undefended route was chosen, what alternatives were considered, what the property was worth at the point of transfer, and what the lender has done with it since. Each of those would require access to documents or people that no public source provides.

The temptation with a sequence like this one is to write the reasoning in, because a plausible account is easy to construct. A plausible account is not a sourced one, and the distinction is the reason this record can cover a living company’s difficulties at all.

Reopening a hotel under a new brand is not a change of signage. An upper-upscale collection standard sets requirements for guest rooms, bathrooms, public areas, food and beverage provision and back-of-house systems, and a property that did not previously meet them has to be brought up to them before it can trade under the name.

That work is paid for at the start and recovered over years of operation, which puts a conversion in the same position as a development for as long as it lasts. The rooms are out of service or partly out of service, the debt is drawing, and the revenue that will service it has not begun. A hotel in that phase is a construction project with a mortgage on it.

Which is why the sequence on this asset is worth reading in order rather than as a single event. The acquisition and the rebrand were announced together in 2021; the reported foreclosure and the handover to the lender came later. Between them sits a period in which the property had to carry capital cost before it could produce income, and no public source establishes how far that work got. The deal mechanics page defines the instruments named here.