Faena Hotel Miami Beach

In a glass vitrine between the pool and the dunes stands a woolly mammoth skeleton finished in gold leaf. Damien Hirst called the piece Gone but not Forgotten, and it sets the tone for the Faena Hotel Miami Beach, which the Argentine developer Alan Faena opened on Collins Avenue in late 2015 inside a post-war landmark, the Saxony.

History

The Saxony opened in 1948 to designs by Roy F. France, one of the architects who shaped Miami Beach in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It was among the first large resort hotels built on the beach after the Second World War, and over the following decades it passed through several owners and long stretches of decline.

Alan Faena had already made his name in Buenos Aires, where in 2004 he opened a hotel in a converted red-brick grain warehouse in Puerto Madero, with interiors by Philippe Starck. In Miami Beach he bought the Saxony and the land around it and laid out what he called the Faena District, several blocks of Mid-Beach that now include a residential tower by Foster + Partners and the Faena Forum, a cultural centre designed by Rem Koolhaas's office OMA. The hotel was the first part of the project to open, in time for the Art Basel Miami Beach week of December 2015.

Architecture and design

Faena asked the film director Baz Luhrmann and the costume and production designer Catherine Martin, his wife and long-time collaborator, to dress the interiors. The result owes as much to cinema as to hotel design. The lobby, called the Cathedral, is lined with gilded columns and large painted murals by the Argentine artist Juan Gatti. Red velvet, leopard print and gold run through the public rooms. On the sand the hotel sets out rows of red and white striped umbrellas, a direct reference to the beach clubs of the 1950s, and they have become the image most visitors take home.

The bedrooms continue the theatre in a softer key, with Luhrmann and Martin's palette of red, cream and turquoise, and many look over the ocean or back across Indian Creek towards the mainland.

Dining

Los Fuegos, the main restaurant, is the work of the Argentine chef Francis Mallmann, whose cooking is built on wood fire, iron griddles and slow-roasted meat and vegetables. The Saxony Bar keeps the old hotel's name alive. The Faena Theater, a red and gold cabaret room off the lobby, stages dinner shows and performances in the manner of a Buenos Aires or Paris revue.

Wellness

The spa, called Tierra Santa Healing House, draws on South American plants and healing traditions, and its rooms face the ocean across the pool deck. The pool itself is framed by palms and the beach club, with Hirst's mammoth keeping watch at one end.

Weddings and events

The Faena Theater, the beach and the terraces are used for private events and weddings, and the Faena Forum nearby offers larger halls for conferences, exhibitions and performances.

Location

The hotel occupies a stretch of Collins Avenue around 32nd Street in Mid-Beach, north of the Art Deco district of South Beach. Of the luxury hotels in Miami Beach, it is the one most closely tied to its own neighbourhood: the Faena Forum and the Faena Bazaar sit across the road, and the district's residential towers rise on either side. Miami International Airport is about 25 minutes away by car outside rush hour, and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International is a longer drive north.