In 1995, when Madonna held herself a lavish 37th birthday party, she chose a suitably trendy location: the Delano, the Art Deco Miami Beach hotel that the impresario Ian Schrager had transformed into a magnet for the glamorati and guests that aspired to be like them.
With its tastemaker clientele and discreet yet indulgent atmosphere, the hotel felt like a mix of a St. Tropez resort crossed with a fashion week after party.
“There were the cool rock star people, there were the Hollywood billionaire types, the downtown fashion New York people, people swimming naked in the pool at 1 a.m.,” said David Barton, the popular trainer whose gym had a branch in the hotel for several years. “You were just in this other world.”
A couple of decades before celebrities’ every move was documented on social media, the Delano was a safe space for revelry without consequences, perhaps with some selfie-free relaxation thrown in. The ambience stretched throughout the property, which included poolside bungalows and Blue Door restaurant, of which Madonna was an owner.
“It was really the Miami equivalent of Studio 54,” said Paul Wilmot, a former fashion publicist and Delano regular in its mid-90s heyday.
Next month, after closing in 2020, cycling through several ownership changes and undergoing a redesign that cost about $100 million, the hotel, in its latest incarnation, Delano Miami Beach, is scheduled to reopen. The reconstituted version is decidedly different than Schrager’s, focusing on pranayama breathing instead of partying and matcha lattes over martinis, with a bit of the atmosphere you might expect at a Soho House thrown in.
The aim, said Ben Pundole, the chief brand officer for Delano Hotels, is “to capture the current zeitgeist of wellness and experience and community.”
These days, getting the in crowd to South Beach may be a challenge. In the past decade or so, other neighborhoods — the Miami Design District, Downtown Miami, Little River, Coconut Grove and Wynwood — have stolen its alluring thunder.
“It’s been a nonfactor for so many years,” Ingrid Casares, a Miami native and an owner of Liquid, the defunct nightclub that opened in South Beach the same week as Schrager’s iteration of the Delano, said of the neighborhood.
“Back in the 1990s, it was like a small village, like Ibiza almost,” she said. “It was a very quaint town where we all knew each other.”
Pundole added that, with the new Delano, “we really have a responsibility to bring some of that back.”
Today’s Delano includes 171 guest rooms, with rates starting at $395. The décor is still imbued with some of the grandeur that guests of a certain age will remember, like extra-high ceilings and grand columns on the ground floor. The new design is sleeker and less imposing, without most of the quirky details — a giant outdoor chess set, diaphanous curtains wafting inside the lobby — dreamed up by the architect and interior designer Philippe Starck.
Where a giant Starck-designed white chair once sat, there’s now a cafe to grab a decaf oat cappuccino; at the renovated Rose Bar, the menu includes mocktails built on ginger ale or soda water alongside Negronis and old-fashioneds. In the basement spa, guests can order CBD shots or mushroom “coffee” and sit in a 22-seat communal sauna designed for what Pundole called “social wellness.”
Miami Beach itself is aiming to rebrand itself around wellness, too. In February, the city introduced its spring break campaign, this year called “Break a Sweat.” On its website, an image of a yoga class on the beach with participants in the downward dog position is captioned “Bottoms Up.” Under a photo of a muscle-clad man inverted over a workout bar, the caption reads, “This is our kind of hang over.”
“That’s an evolution also of what’s happening in our society,” said Steven Meiner, the mayor of Miami Beach. “Drinking is down, especially in the younger generation, and that is being felt and impacted in Miami Beach, as well.”
Miami Beach — a different city than Miami, strictly speaking — is seemingly trying to shift away from its image as a hotbed of partying, especially during spring break. Beyond late-night cacophony, the revelry on South Beach streets like Ocean Drive had a reputation for being potentially dangerous. Sometimes, it lived up to that image: In March 2023, shootings caused two deaths.
“We saw a level of chaos and, unfortunately, violence in the past that we’ve cleaned up the last couple years,” Meiner said. Through measures like increased police visibility, Miami Beach reduced its crime rate by about 20 percent last year compared with 2024.
“South Beach is maturing,” said Lara Koslow, a Miami-based managing director and senior partner at Boston Consulting Group, a global management firm. “It’s moving from a party-first identity toward a more curated, luxury-lifestyle positioning.”
As for its history of debauchery, she said, “that’s both an opportunity and a challenge.”
Perhaps with that in mind, some hotels close to the Delano that were once its chic competitors — the Raleigh, the Sagamore and the Shore Club — are also being reconceived. Nearby, the Fasano Group and Aman Resorts have properties in the works, too.
The opening of hotels like a Miami Beach Aman “could be just enough to have another resurgence down there,” Schrager said.
As for the new Delano, he said: “I don’t really know much about the reopening. I only really know about what we did and the pivotal impact it had on Miami Beach.”
The Delano’s footprint is poised to go well beyond South Beach. It is now a chain with Delano-branded hotels planned in a handful of cities, including New York, over the next few years. There are already Delanos in Paris and Dubai. A Delano-ifed apartment building intends to break ground in Downtown Miami next year.
With the reinvented Delano now set to open in South Beach next month, the question is: Can it survive as a wellness destination?
“Maybe that time has come and gone,” Barton said. “I don’t know that you can recreate what happened at the Delano.”
The post Can the Reinvented Delano Hotel Resuscitate South Beach? appeared first on New York Times.
