Best hotels in Miami | Visually Compare Top Stays Side-by-Side
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An Overview of the Boutique & Luxury Hotel Landscape in Miami
The Art Deco district of South Beach gets all the mythology, but the more interesting design conversation in Miami has shifted north. At Surfside, the Four Seasons at The Surf Club occupies what was, in its 1930s heyday, one of the most glamorous private clubs in the Americas — a Richard Meier restoration brought it back in 2017, though restoration undersells the ambition. The bones of Russell Pancoast's original Surf Club structure remain visible within a development that layered in tower residences and a Four Seasons operation without erasing the palimpsest of the place. A few miles south, Faena Hotel Miami Beach represents a different kind of architectural theater: Alan Faena and Ennio Capasa commissioned Rem Koolhaas's firm OMA to masterplan the Faena District, and the hotel's interiors — executed by Lenny Kravitz's design firm — arrive somewhere between Buenos Aires and old Havana, heavy on crimson and taxidermy. The Setai, also on Miami Beach, takes the opposite approach: a cool, almost severe composition of dark Indonesian stone and minimal service corridors carved out of a 1936 Twenties Deco tower, one of the few examples in the neighborhood where the original structure genuinely disciplines the contemporary additions rather than serving merely as backdrop.
South Beach proper offers more familiar territory for the design traveler. The EDITION, with interiors shaped through Ian Schrager's characteristic orchestration of theatrical minimalism, occupies the former Seville Hotel. The Shelborne by Proper sits in Igor Polevitzky's 1940 original. Even the W South Beach, which leans commercial in its programming, holds its own at the northern end of Collins through sheer spatial confidence. The Ritz-Carlton South Beach, meanwhile, operates out of a Morris Lapidus-era building with all the Mediterranean Revival mannerisms that implies.
The mainland tends to get dismissed by travelers fixated on the beach strip, but Brickell and the Design District make genuine cases for consideration. SLS Lux Brickell and EAST Miami anchor the financial district's growing hotel corridor, the former with Philippe Starck's characteristic mix of wit and provocation, the latter with a more restrained Swire Properties approach to contemporary hospitality. The Moore Miami in the Design District is the quieter outlier — a boutique property in a neighborhood defined by Zaha Hadid's garage, flagships for Dior and Louis Vuitton, and the Pérez Art Museum just south. For a certain kind of visitor, that context is the whole point.
