This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Miami. Our full ‘Where to Stay’ guide is here.
If you travel for work, and sometimes travel to Miami, you will inevitably, at some point, end up at the Fontainebleau.
You will probably agree to go because it is a legendary and pioneering American hotel — one that changed the way America saw luxury when it opened its doors in 1954.
The Fontainebleau is, indeed, famous. When you walk up the white marble stairs into its cavernous lobby, when you see its black-and-white bow-tie tiled floors and enormous chandeliers which have (as a tour guide later tells me) close to a thousand crystals in each, when you take in its mid-century furniture, its historic “staircase to nowhere” on which celebrities would peacock in its heyday, and its guests, who are wandering with eyes up, you feel its grand power.
In Goldfinger, Sean Connery’s James Bond called it the “best hotel on Miami Beach”. Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack were regulars, visiting so often that a Sinatra gallery exists there today. So were Elvis Presley, Lucille Ball and Elizabeth Taylor. Every US president from Dwight D Eisenhower to Barack Obama has stayed in this complex of buildings. Alongside them, approximately two million people per year pass through its 1,500 rooms, 200,000 square feet of meeting space and 11 pools. It is tradition, I’m told, for Miamians to spend their prom night here. Many have vivid high-school memories of wandering drunkenly over its royal-bleu hallway carpets, party hopping from room to room.
