Red velvet, gold leaf, a gilded mammoth in the lobby — and rooms restrained enough to honour the spectacle.
The Faena Hotel Miami Beach occupies the restored Saxony — a 1948 art deco landmark on Collins Avenue at 32nd Street — and the property has been rebuilt at a cost that the owner has never publicly disclosed but that is visible in every surface. The interiors were designed by Alan Faena with Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin, the husband-and-wife team responsible for The Great Gatsby. The lobby's central conceit is a Damien Hirst gilded woolly mammoth skeleton in a vitrine. The corridors are lined with red velvet. The ceilings are murals. None of this is subtle, and that is the point.
The 179 rooms occupy the original Saxony tower and a discreet new oceanfront wing. The design palette is calmer than the public spaces — soft creams and pale blues, white-painted bamboo, and oversized bathrooms in honey marble. Most rooms have furnished balconies; the corner junior suites and oceanfront premier rooms have the views that justify the rates. The Imperial Suite, on the top floor, is a multi-bedroom apartment with a private terrace that looks straight onto the Atlantic.
The food and beverage programme is the most theatrical in Miami. Los Fuegos by Argentine chef Francis Mallmann is the marquee restaurant — open-fire grilling, gaucho asados on Sundays, the kind of meal that turns a hotel stay into a story. Pao by Paul Qui occupies a separate dining room beneath the mammoth. The Living Room serves cocktails to a crowd that arrives for the room itself; the Saxony Bar is the late-night scene. The cabaret, Faena Theater, is a 150-seat horseshoe modeled on a 1920s European opera house and presents shows that draw a paying-non-guest audience.
Service operates at the Forbes Five-Star level the property holds. The beach service — by which is meant cold towels, branded sunscreen, fruit, and a personal beach butler who appears before you have decided you need anything — is the standard against which other Miami hotels are measured. The Tierra Santa Healing House spa runs a full programme of treatments with a Latin American sensibility; the Faena Theater publishes a separate calendar; and the 22,000-square-foot pool deck delivers an experience that is itself worth a stay.
Faena's combination of theatricality and intimacy makes it the most quietly romantic hotel in Miami. The Tree of Life bar, the candlelit beach dinners, the cabaret as a private spectacle — all of it lends a honeymoon the cinematic dimension that most Miami hotels cannot deliver. The corner junior suites with ocean view face the rising sun directly; the rooms have furnished balconies that suit a long, slow morning of breakfast in private. For the milestone version of the same trip, the Faena Spa's hammam ritual is the most ambitious treatment in the city. Other honeymoon hotels →
Rates from $1,046/night. Check availability on Faena.com.
More exceptional options for the same occasion in the same city.
