The owners of the historic Mirasol on Davis Islands have filed to demolish the 56,507-square-foot apartment building, months after Tampa City Council rejected the hotel plan they said was needed to save it.
Frank and Lindsey Carriera bought the Mirasol — a 1926 Mediterranean Revival hotel turned apartments in the 1960s — with a small group of investors for $20 million in 2021. Carriera, a longtime multifamily investment broker who worked on the property’s previous two sales, told council that several developers had already looked at the 1.6-acre waterfront property.
Carriera said the property was worth two to three times more without the existing building than with it. Tearing down the Mirasol and starting over, he said, would have been “the easiest and most profitable path.”
The Carrieras spent more than two years trying to make restoration work anyway, even as years of deferred maintenance and aging systems caught up with the building and the 2024 hurricanes added structural, electrical, plumbing, facade and roof work. The longer they waited, Carriera told council, the more expensive the restoration became.
They proposed returning the Mirasol to its original use as a roughly 110- to 118-room boutique hotel, restoring the existing building, adding new wings where surface parking now sits and moving flood-prone mechanical equipment out of the basement.
The hotel and additional development would bring in the money needed to restore and maintain the old building, but first the owners needed the city to approve changes to the property’s land use and zoning.
“There’s no viable solution and financeable solution unless we have the additional entitlements,” Carriera told council. Without them, he said, preserving the Mirasol under its existing residential use was not financially viable and “the loss of the building” would likely be inevitable.
City Council denied those changes Jan. 15 after a roughly 5.5-hour hearing that drew more than 100 speakers. The hotel could not move forward as proposed, leaving the Carrieras with the same problem they had brought to council: an increasingly expensive building on land Carriera said was worth considerably more without it.
The building has no local historic designation, and council members asked during the hearing what could replace it if it were demolished. Planning Commission staff said the 1.6-acre property carries the same Residential-50 future land-use designation as the Ritz-Carlton Residences on Bayshore and could support the same residential density, although a new project could still require rezoning.
The demolition application does not say what the owners plan to do with the property afterward, whether they have made a final decision to tear down the Mirasol, what would happen to its 58 apartments or when demolition could begin. Frank Carriera did not respond to a request for comment.