The Raleigh, an Original Miami Icon, Will Reopen as a Rosewood
Main Photo: The new Raleigh Miami – imagined
Date: May 2022
Name: The Raleigh – reopening 2025
Location: Miami Beach, Florida, USA
Number of Keys: 60 plus 44 Residences
Seller: Tommy Hilfiger group sold The Raleigh Hotel in 2019 to Michael Shvo and partners for $103M. They had paid $67.5 million for the property in 2014 and planned to turn the hotel, built in the 1940s, into a private club. But then came along Hurricane Irma.
Buyer: SHVO, to be managed by Rosewood. SHVO have some of the most iconic hotels in the USA such as Aman and Mandarin Oreintal New York, Mandarin Oriental Beverly Hills, as well as classic residences
Rosewood Hotels and Resorts has been appointed by real estate development and investment firm SHVO to operate Miami Beach’s iconic hotel, The Raleigh. Acclaimed architect and interior designer Peter Marino has been selected to helm the property’s highly anticipated $243m revival and restoration, embracing the neighbourhood’s Art Deco District and the property’s storied past.
Working closely with the Miami Beach Historic Preservation Board, the revival of The Raleigh will focus on a meticulous restoration that includes Miami’s most iconic swimming pool as well as its famed gathering places, the Martini Bar and Tiger Room. The 60-key hotel will reopen in 2025, alongside a newly constructed contemporary tower comprising 44 Rosewood Residences with unobstructed ocean views.
For Marino, the project is personal. “My mom used to do backstrokes in the pool, saying ‘I’m just like Esther Williams at the Raleigh!,’” he recalls. Decades later, as a friend and creative collaborator of LVMH, he sat by the hotel’s pool—with its sinuous, art deco shape enunciated by a thick, black-tile outline—for Chanel’s 50th anniversary resort-wear show, in which Karl Lagerfeld’s retro-meets-rock collection was displayed alongside underwater theatrics from the U.S. Olympic synchronized swim team.
That pool is properly legendary. Under Marino’s preservationist eye, it’ll go virtually untouched, with “The Folly,” a seashell-like building at one of its corners, revitalized as a funky pool bar.
Alongside it, Marino is building out a number of complementary features. Most notably, he’s adding a 17-story condo tower—the first beachside build approved by Miami’s strict historic preservation board in nearly two decades—whose 44 sprawling Rosewood residences, also designed by Marino, will all face the beach. Prices are yet to be disclosed; Shvo says the waiting list has more people than units.
A members-only beach club, Marino says, will resemble “a Brazilian lima bean.” Rambling gardens, likely to be filled with Les Lalannes sheep sculptures, will connect it to the Raleigh’s neighbouring hotels, the South Seas and the Richmond. Altogether, they’ll make up a three-acre site giving Marino and Rosewood space for all the amenities required of a modern-day urban resort.
“With all three of those elements—the club, the restoration project, the condo tower—it’s an architect’s dream,” Marino says.
Rosewood has a track record for bringing warm hospitality to markets where that can be difficult to find, e.g. Beijing or Paris. Miami is also unique in its ability to draw partiers and families in equal measure; groups with such disparate needs can be difficult to reconcile. The company produces best-in-class kids’ clubs through its Rosewood Explorers program – Chief Executive Officer Sonia Cheng is a mother of four—while creating spaces for unforgettable nights out, such as Bemelmans at the Carlyle.
Marino says that by taking over the adjacent hotels, Rosewood will have enough space to create multiple dining venues—the Raleigh used to have only one restaurant—along with a full-scale spa and three new, rectangular, pools that he is designing with custom mosaic art along the bottoms.
The Martini Bar, almost as essential a space to Miami culture as the main pool, will get a full restoration.
Marino is already revelling in the period details. “We found this hilarious sketch of a martini glass in the original tilework in the floors—I am definitely putting it back in,” he says with a laugh. “Something like that just makes you smile. It would never occur to me in 2022 to do that kind of thing.”
He’s also recreating the original bar’s look by installing a series of back-painted mirrors, each done by a different contemporary artist this time. And in the Tiger Room, a former events space named for the two-tone columns around it, custom tiger-striped murals will adorn a new restaurant with nightclub vibes. “Is there anything sexier that tiger stripes?” Marino asks. “I defy you to think of something more fun.”
Except for the forthcoming redo of the Delano, none of those restorations is as high-profile or high-stakes for Miami Beach as the Raleigh’s. So how will Marino know he’s done justice to the job? Seeing the kind of headline event that rivals mermaid swimming acts and Lagerfeld couture might help, he says. “I want there to be a bodybuilding contest at the pool—full of really sexy, semi-naked bodies—followed by a Brazilian samba party where everybody gets to dance,” says Marino. “Wouldn’t that be perfect?”
Price: Undisclosed
THPT Comment: Old Miami seems to be having a fab revival in this decade…and this is one of the true “Grande Dame” hotels of the strip
First Seen: Bloomberg
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