The Delano—One of Miami Beach’s Most Legendary Hotels—Is Back in Business

Reported by Vogue.

Miami Beach has always been equal parts fantasy and flex, and no address embodied that more completely than the Delano. After a six-year closure and a roughly $100 million renovation, Delano Miami Beach is open again on Collins Avenue — older, softer, and still unmistakably itself.

The original, conceived by Ian Schrager and Philippe Starck and completed in 1947, was a full-sensory provocation: billowing white atrium curtains, an oversized winged chair in the foyer, wrought-iron chairs submerged in the pool, and a life-size chess board on the grounds. Dangerous was the word one besotted guest used in a 1997 letter. Starck described the intention as "a little poetry" and "a little lyrical." Both descriptions were accurate, and somehow so was dangerous. Madonna co-owned a restaurant here. Lenny Kravitz opened a club in the basement. The building's Art Deco fins once made it the tallest structure in Miami Beach. According to Vogue, the lobby's original design has been partially restored, including a bridge across its main span.

Same Bones, New Mood

What returns is not the naughtiness. The 171 guestrooms — down from over 200 — are dressed in bouclé and soft curves. The energy is loungey where it was once clubby, which will likely broaden the audience even as it loses some of the original's edge. Schrager and Starck swung for the fences; this version plays it safe inside the ballpark. There are flashes of high-design contrast — a Salvador Dalí "Leda" chair, an Antonio Gaudí "Calvet" chair — but the overall aesthetic tracks comfortably with current hospitality trends. Kravitz's lucite piano sits in the lobby as a cool artifact. Work by local artists, including Nina Surel, an Art Basel prizewinner, lines the walls.

The fourth floor is the real addition: a secondary pool with a checkered finish nodding to that old chess board, a members' club currently accepting applications, and a new outpost of Mimi Kakushi, the Japanese-inspired restaurant-bar that originated in Dubai, decorated by Pirajeen Lees in rosy wood tones and tactile beaded layers. But the best room in the house is the Rose Bar — tucked behind velvet curtains mid-lobby, anchored by red marble and a gold-backed liquor case. It skips past both the boutique era and the wellness-beige present and lands somewhere in the 1950s. It is, quietly, the most confident thing here.

The Delano has always known that longevity in this city requires adaptation — it's Miami Beach, not a museum. What the renovation preserves is something harder to renovate: the particular electricity of a place that has absorbed decades of glamour, ambition, and spectacle into its terrazzo floors and vaulted ceilings. The edges are sanded down, but the bones remember everything.

A hotel that can hold 1950s grandeur, noughties excess, and the cleaner present all at once isn't trading on nostalgia — it's proof that the original vision was built to last.

Read the original at Vogue.