Ybor City's Latin Quarter — Tampa's cigar-rolling district, built by Cuban and Spanish immigrants in the 1880s and long resistant to the kind of hospitality investment that has transformed comparable American neighborhoods — finally got a hotel worthy of its history when Hotel Haya opened in 2019. The new-build property, designed by architect BW Architects with interiors by Meyer Davis Studio, takes its name from Gavino Gutierrez, the entrepreneur who persuaded Vicente Martinez-Ybor to relocate his cigar factory to Tampa and whose surname translates loosely to beech tree in Spanish. The seven-storey facade translates the neighborhood's Mediterranean Revival vernacular into a contemporary register: stuccoed planes punctuated by arched openings at street level, wrought-iron balcony railings, and black-framed windows that maintain the rhythm of the historic streetscape without resorting to pastiche. Inside, Meyer Davis has organized the 178 rooms around a deep cobalt blue — lacquered headboard panels, dense wool-pile carpeting, indigo drapery pooling at floor level — set against walnut-framed platform beds and bent-plywood side chairs that carry a mid-century Latin American modernism into the palette. The restaurant space is the most atmospheric room in the building: concrete columns left exposed, dense tropical planting banked along the perimeter, bourbon-leather banquettes, rattan-backed armchairs in pale blue velvet, and a vast chandelier of clustered blown-glass forms hovering overhead like a cloud of sea-glass. A narrow lap pool, flanked by white sun loungers and palm plantings, runs along the courtyard between the hotel's two wings.

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A new boutique hotel minutes from downtown Tampa but in a soulful, historic world all its own.