Vogue | September 1995

SOME LIKE IT HOT

There's Something New Under The Sun. In Miami Beach, 's Delano Hotel Offers Safe Haven For The Dangerously Hip.

By Charles Gandee

Two little old ladies were walking down Collins Avenue in Miami Beach late one steamy afternoon not long ago, when they happened upon a man standing on the sidewalk. He was peering up at the jubilant crown of stylized stucco wings perched atop the Delano, a 238-room hotel built in 1947 and named, in the patriotic spirit of that postwar time, after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Seizing the moment-and the man on the sidewalk-the two little old ladies demanded to know if what they'd been hearing around town for months was true. So they asked, "Is this Madonna's hotel? It is, isn't it? You can tell us. Really."

Although the answer, alas, was no, the question delighted the man on the sidewalk, , who is, in fact, the proud proprietor of the hotel. Because what it means that little old ladies are circulating sexy, albeit apocryphal, stories about the Delano is that there's a buzz around the formerly derelict, Deco-inspired tower Schrager just spent $28 million reinventing as a Stateside resort for the St. Barts crowd. And if there is one thing loves, it's a buzz, that seductive siren call that issues forth from some mysterious source to alert all those tuned in to a particular frequency that this or that restaurant or bar or nightclub-or hotel-is one of those be-there-or-hang-your-head-in-shame places where the hip and the would-be hip convene to eye each other.

Creating a buzz has been a Schrager specialty since 1977, when he and his late business partner, Steve Rubell, hit upon the then fresh idea of opening a discotheque that specialized in keeping people standing outside in the rain while, inside, Halston and Bianca and Andy and Fran and Calvin tripped the light fantastic. Eighteen years after Studio 54, of course, the cultural climate has mercifully shifted away from such sadomasochistic elitism. But no matter. Schrager is unparalleled in anticipating shifts in the cultural climate, which he then translates into commercial ventures-and markets as if there's no tomorrow. (Before the first construction crew had made a dent in the Delano, Schrager let it leak to the press that Madonna would be an "active" investor in the hotel's restaurant, the Blue Door.)

Whether you liken Schrager to a weather vane or to a chameleon, either simile is apt. Because each of the five high-profile projects the 49-year-old impresario has completed since his 1981 release from a minimum security prison in Montgomery, Alabama (where he served eighteen months for income-tax evasion), can be viewed as a kind of time capsule, conjuring up a particular moment in social history.

In 1984, for example, in the wake of Studio 54, Schrager opted for the discreet charm of the European bourgeoisie with Morgans, a low-key 113-room hotel on lower Madison Avenue, designed by the woman Air France would later enlist to redecorate the Concorde, AndrÈe Putman. A year later, Schrager tapped into the new found fascination with New York's young art stars by commissioning Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf to create large-scale installations for the Palladium, his and Rubell's second New York discotheque, designed by Arata Isozaki, the Tokyo-based architect responsible for L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art.

And in 1988, at the peak of the decade's exhibitionistic excesses, Schrager summoned Philippe Starck from Paris to produce the slick and slightly sinister Royalton, a 205-room hotel in midtown Manhattan where, for the price of a New Amsterdam ($6.25), yuppies in Emporio Armani suits can strut up and down the lobby's Yves Klein-blue carpet alongside a curious assortment of ratty rock stars, Ray-Banned movie stars, and self-possessed publishing czars on their way to "44," a trendy restaurant where there are good tables, not-so-good tables, and I'd-rather-go-hungry tables. Two years later, sensing that the country was suddenly feeling very thrifty, if not downright poor, Schrager called Starck back from Paris to design the Paramount, a budget-conscious 610-room hotel in New York's theater district that attempts to compensate for minuscule rooms with a whole lotta theatrical pizzazz.

Which brings us to 1995, a moment, according to , when the mood of the country has shifted yet again.

Witness the Delano.

"This is what's happening now," boasts Schrager, standing in the middle of a monumental, 250-foot-long corridor that bisects the lobby of his fourth hotel to connect a grand portico overlooking Collins Avenue to an even more grand terrace overlooking a grove of ficus trees and, beyond, the Atlantic Ocean. "The Delano is a much more laid-back, down-to-earth design than what we've done before," he continues, undeterred by the contradiction between what he's saying and the 18,000 linear feet of diaphanous white curtains cascading 22 feet down from the lobby ceiling. "Like, you know, we did 'cheap chic' at the Paramount, which was a reaction to the eighties, but now things have balanced out. People want to be in a glamorous place, but it can't be over-the-top."

Not a man to resist the temptation to name-drop a bit, Schrager sums up his new aesthetic vision by drawing a knowing analogy to fashion. "We're sort of playing with the same deck as Prada here-you know, people don't mind spending money, and they don't mind seeing a little label, but it's not like it was in the eighties.... It's got to be more undercover, more quiet." Never have the words undercover and quiet been quite so relative.

The reference to Prada's triangular metal logo is anything but arbitrary. After all, Schrager has self-consciously turned his own name into a kind of designer label, which he now applies to, among countless other things, the Delano telephones-all 580 of which remind you that you're dialing from "an Hotel." Elsewhere around the Delano the cult of name-as-brand continues unabated with the contributions of the many high-profile talents Schrager enlisted to lend their expertise-and cachet. In addition to "active" investor Madonna, that roster includes Philippe Starck, David Barton, Fabien Baron, Brian McNally, Madison Cox, and Donald Kaufman-all names that nowadays pass as labels themselves. Perhaps a suitable test for admission to that club that calls itself the cognoscenti would be matching each bold-faced name with his contribution to the Delano. Who designed the hotel? The graphics? The garden? The palette? Who's responsible for the gym? The restaurant? Even the Delano china bears the stamp of a hip brand name-actually, two hip brand names: Calvin Klein and Swid Powell.

Although some might say that Schrager is showing up a few years late on the sizzling South Beach scene (which unofficially began in 1987, when Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood opened a Pepto-Bismol-pink nightclub on the beach), the hotelier is rarely so animated as when explaining that the Delano is a world apart from its physical place in the sun. "This hotel has zero to do with South Beach-absolutely zero," he insists. "I wouldn't invest millions of dollars based upon the continued existence of models walking up and down Ocean Drive."

If Schrager is sensitive about the dubious reputation South Beach has garnered in recent years, he should relax and let the Rollerbladers in thongs enjoy the beach's cheap thrills while they still can. Because the Delano marks the beginning of the second wave of development in South Beach, which means that it also marks the end of the almost-provincial innocence that has given the area its charm and character for the past decade. In other words, goodbye 75-cent cafés con leche served by "no English" Cuban waitresses with festive combs in their hair, and hello $4 cappuccinos served by muscle-bound waiters with attitude-and head shots on file down the beach at Irene Marie Model Management.

As the escalating cost of caffeine suggests, South Beach's second wave is appreciably more sophisticated than the first, which basically entailed spraying Lysol into the corners of mildewy little candy-colored hotels that cater to gangs of fun-in-the-sunners crammed into $50-a-night rooms with take-your-chances bed linens. These days, a different clientele is being lured to the beach by luxurious accommodations carrying luxurious price tags. The penthouse of architect Michael Graves's 104-unit condominium tower, 1500 Ocean Drive, for example, will set you back some $1.8 million-which is a cool million less than the penthouse of Portofino Towers, a 228-unit condominium fifteen blocks south. In fact, what passes for almost reasonable in South Beach these days is Trésor, a ten-story condominium by Arquitectonica, where the penthouse is a relatively modest $750,000.

Also sprouting up along the beach recently is a group of hotels that cater to the concierge crowd. There's the Impala, designed by Peter Hawrylewicz, the architect responsible for the renovation of Casa Casuarina, Gianni Versace's palatial villa on Ocean Drive; the Greenview, designed by Paris-based Chahan Minassian (and owned, coincidentally, by Jason Rubell, the nephew of Schrager's former partner); and, of course, the Raleigh, which has reigned as the queen of South Beach hotels since it opened in December 1992. While each of these hotels has played its part in upping the ante in accommodations along the beach, the stakes were raised exponentially on June 30, the day the Delano finally flung open its doors and Norma Kamali waltzed in looking a tad like a dominatrix, minus the whip, in skintight black leggings, a skintight black halter top, and black mules.

While Kamali would have cut a wide swath anywhere that afternoon, as she draped herself across a chaise longue outside her bilevel bungalow by the Delano pool-where designer Victor Alfaro was showing off his shimmering silver navel ring-she looked like nothing short of an apparition (A droll one: "Don't interrupt me, I'm aging my skin," she cautioned.) What cast Kamali in such a surreal light, of course, was the context: Deployed throughout the hotel were 125 bright-eyed young girls and boys wearing white shorts, white T-shirts, white jackets, white shoes, and white socks-all of which matched perfectly the white hotel with the white curtains, white awnings and white massage tables.

If Hollywood should ever decide to adapt Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, the set designer would be wise to take a tour through the Delano, taking special note of the guest rooms, which appear to have been designed the morning after a dream about Mann's ne plus ultra Swiss sanatorium. To some, the rooms' shimmering white epoxy floors, painted-white wood furniture, matte white walls, crisp white cotton slipcovers, and, yes, white televisions, stereos, and refrigerators may recall a heavy snowfall. To others, they may invite memories of Miami in the early eighties, a time and a contraband made popular by both Scarface and Miami Vice. But no matter what associations you bring to the blanket of white that all but covers the hotel, the effect is ultimately the same-otherworldly, dreamlike.

There is some variation in the palette in the lobby, however, where wide-plank Brazilian-cherry floors provide a dense platform for a series of surreal furniture arrangements that introduce reproduction period pieces to the avant-garde work of, among others, Antoni GaudÌ and Salvador Dali. But still, those 18,000 feet of diaphanous white curtains have a way of transporting you into the ethereal world Schrager aspired to create. It is, as all that white suggests, a world free of everyday concerns-not least among them, the question of who's going to keep all that white white.

The idea is escape, of course. And abandon. And self-indulgence. And hedonism. Where else can grown-ups spend the day flat on their backs in a three-inch-deep puddle of water that occupies 900 square feet of a 4,500-square-foot pool designed for lounging, not swimming?

And where else would actress Jennifer Beals-who stopped off at the Delano after filming Devil in a Blue Dress, Four Rooms, and Let It Be Me-be so inspired after a grand tour of the grand hotel that she concocted a fairy tale, of sorts, to accompany her as she made her way from lobby to pool? "I had a fantasy today," confessed Beals. "I was in a pink ball gown. It was quite an extraordinary dress, really-by Richard Tyler, God bless him. Anyway, I pretended I was this chick, you know, from the Lower East Side, who had scrounged up all her money to come to this fabulous hotel with her boyfriend, Reinaldo, who she told not to bring his crack pipe, 'cause that would not be cool. Anyway, Reinaldo and I were supposed to go to this big ball at the hotel, but right before the ball Reinaldo ditched me for some Upper East Side chick he met. And I was really pissed off because this Upper East Side chick had enough money to, you know, get waxed at Elizabeth Arden, and I didn't. Anyway, I throw a fit-you know, start cussing and everything. I'm all dressed up in my pink ball gown with no place to go. And I'm really mad, and really drunk, and they're trying to get me out of the lobby because everybody's noticing."

At this point, Beals slips into her best Rosie Perez accent and launches into her Delano-inspired fantasy, which may not be the fantasy had in mind, but no matter-to each his or her own: I paid $500 for that suite, and I can do whatever I want to in this lobby. I don't care if you own it; I own it, too, because I bought stock in this damn hotel when I rented that damn suite.

"I like to play," said a slightly sheepish Beals after she'd returned to normal. Beals came to the right place.