Flamboyance Gets a Face-Lift

By RUTH LA FERLA
Published: October 31, 2008
Miami Beach

Barbara P. Fernandez for The New York Times, top; Sam Shere/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
THEN AND NOW The new lobby of the Fontainebleau, top, echoes highlights of the original, bottom, like the bow tie floor pattern and the striated columns.
MARILYN RUBINSON recalls her stays at the Fontainebleau hotel as a series of high-fashion snapshots. There were afternoons at the cabana, “a blue hotel towel wrapped around my head like a turban and wearing high-heeled Lucite shoes,” she said. There were evenings at the Gigi Room, rubbing shoulders with New York’s dashing mayor, John V. Lindsay; and she remembers sweeping down the dramatic lobby staircase in a form-fitting, stone-colored gown. “In those days everyone made an entrance,” Mrs. Rubinson, 84, said. “I made lots of entrances.”

In that heady era the hotel was the diadem of Miami resorts, a 560-foot-long, sickle-shaped showplace dominating the Collins Avenue waterfront, where Miamians like the Rubinsons, who own a chain of clothing stores, and well-to-do snowbirds came in the winter to roost.

“Everyone who was anyone was there,” Mrs. Rubinson said. “People wore black tie and jewelry. Everyone was young.”

And everyone lived large at the flamboyant resort, conceived from its outset to evoke a modern Versailles. “It was the place for entertainment, for glamour — an icon even among the locals,” said Cathy Leff, the director of the Wolfsonian museum of design here. “Even now if one asks, ‘Within the city of Miami Beach, what is the most important landmark in the popular imagination?’ it would be the Fontainebleau.”

Can an icon of the past be restored to its former glory? New owners and architects of the Fontainebleau have invested $1 billion to buy and restore it in the conviction that it can. Its original fusion of Modernist rigor and Hollywood cheek, dreamed up by the maverick architect Morris Lapidus, was derided as Bronx baroque, until the singular style of Miami Beach was rediscovered by the Ian Schrager generation.

“In its day in the ’50s and ’60s, the Fontainebleau was state of the art in glamour,” said Jeffrey Beers, the New York architect responsible for an extensive update of the interior. “We would like to restore that in spirit.”

When the refurbished resort is officially unveiled on Nov. 14 with a series of parties and a taping for television of a Victoria’s Secret fashion show — perfect! — visitors will be able to judge for themselves if the mission succeeded. Even recently, as the hotel was still a construction site, it was clear that the old duchess had flounced out her skirts.

“How many places like this can you go in America that are not in the desert?” said Jeffrey Soffer, executive chairman and majority partner of Fontainebleau Resorts, which is building a Fontainebleau in Las Vegas. Indeed, as he strolled the raised oceanfront walkway that overlooks the property, it was obvious the resort had much in common with over-the-top hotels on the Strip.

Visible from the walkway is a pool complex fanning out across the lawns, and a new 40,000-square-foot glass-walled spa, its steam rooms and reflecting pools worthy of the emperor Hadrian. Crescent-shaped rows of cabanas edge the pools and echo the undulating outlines of the Chateau, the hotel’s original building.

Several towers, two of them new, flank the Chateau, for a combined 1,500 guest rooms, twice the number of the Fontainebleau’s largest competitor, Loews in South Beach. There are also shops, 11 restaurants and lounges, and about 200,000 square feet of meeting and convention space — all sprawling over 22 acres.

The three-year renovation was conceived, in part, to lure back fashionable crowds, which have drifted down to South Beach.



With renovated rooms from $399 and suites from $509, the Fontainebleau is reopening at a challenging time for tourism. Hotel occupancy rates in Miami-Dade County were down by 6 percent in September from a year earlier, and room revenues fell by 4 percent, said John Lancet, a senior executive in Miami for HVS, a national hotel consulting company.

But Mr. Lancet viewed the Fontainebleau development as only mildly risky. “It is my impression that the owners went through adequate planning so that the risk could be mitigated,” he said.

THE hotel has some $30 million in bookings through early next year, said Howard C. Karawan, the chief operating officer of Fontainebleau Resorts, who was brought in by the new owners to oversee renovations and operations for the company.

Rumors are widespread that the $500 million face-lift was made in anticipation that the city would legalize casino gambling. The developers deny this, and gambling has yet to win acceptance with local lawmakers.

At the hub of the resort is the Chateau’s 45,000-square-foot lobby, an elaboration on the original free-form elliptical shape completed by Lapidus in 1954.

Its original curvaceous outlines were accentuated by three enormous chandeliers, striated Greek-style columns, swirling carpets and a mural of a Piranesi print. The lobby’s famous focal point was a “staircase to nowhere,” which actually led from a discreet cloakroom, where ladies could shed their wraps before descending divalike down the white marble steps.

The new lobby, like its predecessor, is a chambered nautilus, all undulating walls and recesses. Mr. Beers stripped away ’70s-era carpeting to expose the original marble floor with its signature bow tie design. He covered the wall at the staircase in gold tile and added a light installation by the artist James Turrell and a lounge with a blue reflective floor. The staircase to nowhere is back, the jewel in a set piece expected to draw crowds who want to see and be seen.
And perhaps to retrace the footsteps of previous guests. Those who stayed at the hotel in Miami Beach’s golden age recall a resort that Lapidus, who died in 2001 at 98, had envisioned as a laboratory. It was a place, he wrote, “where I could enlarge upon all the theories I had been developing about human nature and the emotional hunger that the average man had for visual excitement.”

Fontainebleau Resorts, LLC
A rendering of one of the V.I.P. cabanas.
At bars and supper clubs — the Gigi Room, the Poodle Lounge — “women would sit with their little fur stoles and white gloves on to eat,” recalled Deborah Desilets, a Miami architect and former associate of Lapidus. Sheathed in slinky gowns, “they would stop at the mezzanine, put on their jewelry and wave at their husbands in the lobby below,” she said.

Michelle Oka Doner, an artist and a frequent guest as a girl — her father, Kenneth Oka, was mayor of Miami Beach in the late ’50s and early ’60s — remembers the resort, where she had a prom and her wedding, “as my stage and my launching pad.”

The Fontainebleau was a decadent paradise of “flashy diamonds, illicit sex and overflowing ice cream sodas,” she said. To get to her family’s cabana, “you had to walk through the downstairs shops and past a dance studio where they had all these gorgeous guys giving cha-cha lessons to all these overdressed matrons from Scarsdale.”

“People came for the half-naked girls and the revues,” she said. And, of course, for trysts. “I knew something illicit was going on, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.”

The lobby was a hub for celebrity spotting, the hotel itself a backdrop against which the Rat Pack played poker and James Bond sprang from the high dive in “Goldfinger.”

“The floor was like a mirror, so shiny you could see yourself,” said Levi Forte, a bellman at the Fontainebleau since the ’60s. “Danny Thomas couldn’t keep his eyes off that floor. He’d sit there and comb his hair and ask, ‘Levi, how do I look?’ ”

Mel Dick, who moved to Miami from Brooklyn in the ’60s, visited on his honeymoon. He recalled being drawn to a sign outside the hotel barbershop that beckoned, “Come and have your shoes shined by the former lightweight champion of the world.” It was Sidney Walker, known as Beau Jack, recalled Mr. Dick, a wine company executive. “I sat down in the seat and I gave him five dollars. I told him: ‘I don’t want you to shine my shoes. I just want to look at you.’ ”

Mrs. Rubinson was just as enthralled by her frequent star sightings. “How many times driving up to the Fontainebleau I would see Frank Sinatra walking up the drive with a glass in his hand,” she said.

“We had a more glamorous lifestyle in those days,” she added wistfully. “But then, of course, things changed.”

In succeeding decades the resort lost its sparkle. Like other supersize hotels lining Collins Avenue north of 44th Street, including the neighboring Eden Roc, another shiny Lapidus edifice, it became as dated as Grandma’s minaudière.

Fast forward to the current renovation. “We kept asking ourselves, ‘What would Morris do?’ ” Mr. Karawan said.

John Nichols, a Miami architect responsible for the adjacent Fontainebleau residential towers, the second of which has just been completed, was hired to gut and redesign the hotel. He preserved Lapidus embellishments like the perforated “Swiss cheese” outer walls. “We had to get down into a very high level of detail,” Mr. Nichols said. “You don’t just go in there and take off the eyebrows.”

Ms. Oka Doner admires the renovation, to a point. “The property is kind of post-postmodern,” she said. “Morris Lapidus had real passion,” but in its current incarnation, “irony has trumped passion.”

But Ms. Desilets, the former Lapidus associate, who visited the site last month, was over the moon. “They used incredible engineering to laser trace what was there and rebuilt it with accuracy,” she said. “It’s going to be like a Ravenna mosaic. It’s a wow type of extravagance.”

The exuberant aesthetic of the original has been resurrected in three ballrooms, lavish restaurants and five swimming and reflecting pools.

The pool cabanas have wraparound sofas and flat-panel televisions. Perched on the property’s topmost tier is a V.I.P. pool deck with six additional teak cabanas, a bar and a D.J. booth.

Mr. Forte, the bellman, recently viewed the improvements. “The place is so pretty, the first time I saw it I thought I was in the wrong hotel,” he said. “I said to my wife, ‘Just take a look at what money can do.’ ”

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