The Cloister at Sea Island

The Hotel

The Cloister opened in 1928 as a Mediterranean-revival winter resort designed by Addison Mizner — the Palm Beach architect whose Worth Avenue work defines the loose category of Florida-Spanish-revival luxury — for the Sea Island Company, a Howard Coffin-led venture that had purchased the barrier island in 1926. The hotel was conceived from the start as the social anchor of the Golden Isles winter season; within a decade it was hosting four sitting US Presidents and the kind of multi-generational American family booking — Bushes, Carnegies, Coolidges — that would define the property for the rest of the twentieth century. The original Mizner main building was demolished and rebuilt in 2006 in a faithful, larger version that preserves the Spanish-Mediterranean massing while bringing the rooms to a contemporary five-star scale.

Accommodations split across the Main Building (the headline Mizner-revival rooms and suites, all renovated through 2024), the Cloister Wings (Garden Wing, North and South Wings — the larger contemporary rooms with garden or river views), the Cloister Ocean Residences and the Beach Club Rooms (directly on the Atlantic, recommended for shorter stays focused on beach and pool). The 196 keys give the property the scale to handle a corporate retreat, a wedding for 400, and a multi-generation family booking on the same weekend without the property feeling occupied. Ocean Residences are the largest accommodations on the island — three- to six-bedroom houses with full kitchens and direct beach access, the standard booking for the four-generation American family that has been coming for decades.

The Cloister carries the only American Forbes Five-Star triple-crown that has been continuous: the main hotel, the spa (the Cloister Spa & Fitness Center, Mediterranean-revival bathhouse, eighteen treatment rooms), and the dining room (the Georgian Room — the only Forbes Five-Star restaurant in Georgia for over a decade). Beyond the headline three, the resort also runs the Davis Love III–designed Plantation Course and Seaside Course, the Lodge at Sea Island's Forbes Five-Star sister property (a separate booking for couples-only golf-focused stays), the Beach Club at Sea Island for the more casual family beach-day axis, and Broadfield (a separate sporting estate inland for shooting and equestrian activities — the most distinctly Sea Island offering).

Service is the property's defining proposition. Sea Island Company has run a ten-week Sea Island Service training programme since 1928 — the longest continuous in-house hospitality school in American resort history — and the staff retention rates are an order of magnitude above the segment norm. The combined effect is a property that operates at a level of formality the rest of American luxury hospitality has largely abandoned: jacket-required dining at the Georgian Room, formal afternoon tea in the Spanish Lounge, gentleman-of-the-bath service in the suites for the historic ritual of the evening turndown. For multi-generational American families and for Forbes Five-Star traditionalists, there is no comparable address in the Southeast.

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