• Wonderful Art Deco pool voted as one of the ten most beautiful in the world.
• One of Miami’s original Art Deco jewels located in a part of the city listed in its entirety on the National Register of Historic Buildings.
• The hotel is a haven of peace and tranquillity, shielded from the outside world by a blanket of lush foliage.
- Combine the The Raleigh with the gem of the Caribbean; The House. From £1499pp - save upto 40% on room rates. Four nights at The House, 3 nights at The Raleigh. Travel by December 18th 2010, book by September 6th.
The Whole Story
This is the pool - immortalized in the movies of synchronized swimmer Esther Williams, voted by Travel & Leisure magazine as one of the ten most beautiful in the world, lauded by Life in the fifties as the most glamorous swimming pool in Florida, this giant pastiche of baroque curves surrounded by Moroccan medjul palm trees can still, more than six decades later, elicit oohs and ahs from new guests. There are larger pools in Miami, some with fountains in the middle, but none has the sensational impact of the Raleigh's jewel-like Art Deco lagoon.
Designed and built in 1940 at the peak of Miami's formative years, the Raleigh is one of architect Lawrence Murray Dixon's mature works. Dixon, recently the subject of a major retrospective at the Bass Museum of Art, was the most prolific and acclaimed architect of Miami Beach during the 1930s and '40s. As the designer of the Tides, the Marlin, the Atlantis and numerous other hotels and apartment buildings, Dixon is credited with bringing Art Deco to Miami. This part of the city has been listed in its entirety on the National Register of Historic Buildings.
What distinguishes Dixon's legacy above all is the way that he reinvented the Art Deco style to suit Miami's emergence as the pre-eminent resort destination in the United States in the 1920s and '30s. In the earliest days of Miami's transformation from a sub-tropical barrier island, developers, engineers and entrepreneurs were more interested in making the fledgling city pseudo-Mediterranean. The first grand hotels were built in the elaborate and hugely expensive manner of the properties of Nice and Cannes - because Miami had been pegged as a rich man's playground, this was the architectural style assumed to be appropriate. But the Mediterranean Revival came to an abrupt end with the stock market crash of 1929. It was during the post-Depression 1930s that Miami Beach acquired the iconic style for which it is renowned today. Tourism for the middle classes, not just the rich, was the new popular dream of the 1930s, and Miami was not only the fastest growing city in the United States, but its architects were inventing a new aesthetic to embody that dream. They ditched the lavish and anachronistic Mediterranean idiom in favour of streamlined Art Deco.
This was a style that was unequivocally oriented to the futures It celebrated the industrial age with a visual vocabulary that borrowed heavily from the great ocean liners of the era: buildings had masts, polished metal surfaces, shiny glass, and exterior trim lines in bright greens, blues, oranges or pinks set against huge expanses of neutral white or beige, echoing the hull of a ship. It was a style disciplined by the constraints of budget, and the Art Deco buildings of South Beach are essentially fairly simple box-like structures. But they are saved from the banality of their uniform geometry by flamboyant ornamental flourishes, an adornment that came to express the fantasy of Florida. Pelicans, tropical fish, serpents and palm trees were incorporated into stylized sculptural friezes along the exterior of many buildings. Inside, it became practically inconceivable by the mid-1930s for a hotel not to have murals. These featured everything from a Native American paddling his canoe through the Florida Everglades to dancing figures frolicking on a beach to wild geese and pink flamingos lifting into flight beneath a silver ceiling: the visual themes captured the escapist fantasy that Miami represented in the national imagination.
Among the many architectural treasures that have survived from Miami's golden age, the Raleigh has always been able to claim the best bones. So it's highly appropriate that this most South Beach of all South Beach hotels should have fallen into the capable hands of André Balazs. As proprietor and impresario of some of America's most individual hotels, Balazs is famous for his ability to make a place hip. His flair is not just for creating surface style, but also for pinpointing and amplifying the essence of what makes a particular place unique. The Mercer is SoHo to the core, Chateau Marmont is as LA as it gets, and now Balazs is pulling off the same feat with Miami's legendary Raleigh. Art Deco was never just about seductive show, it was also about the art of living, and it's this dual philosophy that Balazs has brought to the renovation of the Raleigh. The result is neither loud nor flashy, but memorable in a more subtle way – like an exquisitely tailored suit, whose quality, originality and impeccable taste reveal themselves without the need for fanfare.
The Rooms
An Art Deco masterpiece inside and out, period fixtures and fittings infuse the Raleigh’s 104 guest rooms and suites.
Sunset View Rooms
These rooms enjoy a view of the city, whilst providing respite from its heat. Flat-screen plasma TVs, DVD players, wireless connectivity and and designer bath products abound.
Oceanfront Room
Roomier than Sunset view rooms, yet just as luxuriously appointed, with views of the beach and ocean.