Fontainebleau Miami Beach

A glamorous award winner: The Fontainebleau Miami Beach Florida is a glamorous Oceanfront Resort with Award-Winning Restaurants and an Electric Nightlife. It is one of the most historically and architecturally significant hotels in Miami Beach and opened its doors 1954. 

It was designed by famed  Morris Lapidus and it was arguably the most luxurious hotel in Miami Beach, and it is thought to be the most significant building of Lapidus’s career.

Over the years, it underwent numerous updates and it is still considered an epic hotel. It has been even on the ABC’s new nighttime soap, Grand Hotel which was a family story with a patriarch involved  – Santiago Mendoza (Demián Bichir) with his glamorous second wife, Gigi (Roselyn Sánchez), and their grown-up children. Of course there is plenty of drama involved in this series. Even though this was quite a dramatic series,  this should not deter from the fact that the hotel can also be a perfect stage for a very relaxing vacation 🙂 The TV series was created by Brian Tanen and it’s executive producer is Eva Longoria. Read more here.

The colorful history of this Miami Beach landmark is quite interesting. It began with when Ben Novack Senior’s  dream of building the world’s greatest hotel in Miami Beach and so, he materialized his dream:  in 1954 this grand hotel opened its doors. At this time, the Fontainebleau was the height of lavishness and excess. Lapidus was not modest in his design, to say the least and the hotel was a magnet for the rich and famous and anybody who wanted to indulge in a most glamorous lifestyle with lots of parties and entertainment being offered.

The hotel design was quite unusual with woggles shaped like an artist’s palette, boomerang and table shaped cutouts in ceilings, amoeba-like cutouts in walls, Swiss cheese holes, beanpoles, and metal rods supporting nothing. However, the design was not the only thing which was out of the ordinary: Bellboys wore gold braided purple uniforms, there was a “Staircase to Nowhere” ,  women dressed in couture and jewels could take an elevator to the top to deposit their coats and glamorously descend the stairs to the lobby. If you like more information about the Fontainebleau and greater Miami Beach, I recommend the book Fool’s Paradise by Steven Gaines. It will give you quite an insight in these times.

But let’s get back to today’s times and after several renovations, this hotel can truly say, it has been kept up. Recently, the original Morris Lapidus design underwent a $ 1 Billion Dollars (yes you heard it right 1 Billion) expansion and renovation and the result is not for the faint hearted: 12 restaurants, 10 pools, 4 clothing boutiques and a 40,000-square-foot spa and more… this oceanfront hotel has it all. Frank Sinatra and other members of the Pat Rack, who loved the glitz and glamour were some of the famous guests.  This grand hotel’s guest list still has no shortcoming in the “famous” and “want-to-be-seen” department. To mention a few of recent sightings: Jay-Z, Kany West, Rihanna and many more. Maybe you just book a stay and you can find all the other ones there 🙂

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Tip: If you should be new to Miami and Miami Beach, you might wonder how to pronounce the hotel’s name:  the hotel has chosen the anglicized version of “fountain blue” rather than the normal French pronunciation of the word.