"New York?" the bellhop wonders aloud. He's sizing up my white shirt, which somehow seems less than radiant against the room's bright pearl. That Manhattan patina, you know. He adjusts the air-conditioning and raises the blinds. I squint out on what might be the pool.
I'm nervous as I watch him set my heavy brown suitcase down, for fear it will scuff something. The floor is so polished it looks transparent.
I look around for the luggage rack, but there isn't one. There isn't much of anything. No tropical beach watercolors, thankfully. Nothing on the stucco walls but an apple balanced on a sideways-mounted coat hook. A bed with a surface smooth as frosted glass. A glaring white armchair. A smart and simple white console in the corner, hiding an ivory television set and a matching stereo with CD player. All is bleached out except for the daisy stems and the console's pistachio interior, which matches the surf 200 yards from my window.
The 238-room Delano, which opened in June, is something of a departure for hotelier . In this 1947 South Beach landmark he is trying to fuse the family resorts of old Miami Beach with the sophisticated boutique hotels he invented in New York. Schrager the provocateur calls his new hotel "undesigned"-"less to see, more to feel"-but of course everything is meant to be looked at. Designer Philippe Starck, who helped take Schrager's Royalton and Paramount hotels to the edge, has furnished the public areas like a Whitman's sampler: a Charles Eames plastic amoeba seat stares down a wicker end table; a leather wing chair sidles up to a faux-fur-draped chaise.
You'll also find, just inside the lobby, a bright eat-in kitchen, where a long communal table is laden with fruit bowls and surrounded by high stools. Jars of raisins and pastas pose cleverly on the shelves, along with baskets of bread, a toaster here, a juicer there. This could be a diorama of suburban American life. Someone is usually around to fix you lunch. The idea is, you're supposed to sort of spontaneously drop in, whenever you feel like it, like maybe you can't wait till dinner, and you casually pull up a stool, and you order, say, rock shrimp tempura.
Things here need a bit of translation.
"This is the gift shop," explains the cashier to a befuddled guest who has stumbled upon the museumlike display, also just off the lobby. Taschen art books with titles like Fetish Girls sit prettily on the racks next to Czech & Speake colognes-not a Crichton novel or Tums packet in sight.
A photographer in the men's room spends a few moments trying to turn on the faucet (a foot pedal is eventually discovered). A teenager wonders if that twisted French horn of a chair is safe for sitting. And can you really eat those cookies glistening on the kitchen table?
Depending on your mood, the Delano is either refreshing or confounding, whimsical or awkward, not unlike those rotary-dial phones in the lobby. At times you'll be grateful for something unstyled and uncomplicated, like an afternoon at the beach, which looks and operates exactly like any other beach. (Chaise longues, gratis. Jet Skis, $55 an hour.) When the steamy midday persuades you, return to your room to write postcards on a chilly marble desktop.
I notice the significant children's section in the guest directory. The small cinema downstairs offers G-rated classics nightly. Greg, the youthful concierge, speaks eagerly of starting up some song-and-dance or craft programs for the kids this season, and reminds me of the playpen beside the Beach Bar, the supervised pool games, the televisions wired for Disney. He points to a Foosball table, although at the moment a couple of male models are hogging the fun.
Watching a three-wheeled stroller glide across the curtained portico, I think, How refreshing it is to find an adult resort that accommodates children-as opposed to a family hotel that makes room for adults. Nothing here is shrill. No goofy faces are made at your children. You do not have to specify an "alcoholic" daiquiri.
"You look better with a baby here."
While your children are splashing it up at Camp Delano, you'll have plenty of opportunity to soak up the deliciously murky lobby, trying out all its hidden nooks. And the kids will have lots to amuse them beyond the playpen. Like the way the bellhops, in white jackets, T-shirts, and shorts, appear to have forgotten their pants.
By sundown everyone has gathered at Brian McNally's marvelous Blue Door, the hotel's formal dining room and surely South Beach's newest coveted booking. Should they be available, you must start with the frog's legs, in a garlic broth with artichokes and shiitake and portobello mushrooms. Seafood figures prominently among the entreÈs, though your best bet is the duck breast accompanied by the poached figs. For dessert? Your basic root beer float, served with a mint sprig in a martini glass.
When I return to the lobby someone is actually sitting in that French horn chair; she's wearing an electric magenta dress and white platforms and doesn't seem the least bit uncomfortable. The room is roaring now, and cool English soul warbles from above (Sade recordings are part of the decor).
I escape to the Beach Bar, where torches flicker and only a few couples have settled in. The tumbling surf, the soft lamplight on the lanais, the Deco hotel towers cresting down South Beach.
Sometime after 11 an Antonio Banderas look-alike leads his groggy two-year-old daughter up to bed, pausing to air-kiss someone who might in fact be Sade.
I wake up early the next morning to one of those thrilling south Florida downpours that rattle the windows, sky and sea reflected in my room's white and pearl-gray two-tone. Below, the white canvas beach umbrellas are folded up, like bishops all in a row.
Room service arrives with buttermilk banana waffles.
The rain lets up, and I wander among the cabanas to find the perfect hammock. Swaying between creaking palms, I remind myself how most hotel pool terraces, when empty, carry the sad air of a failed party. Not this one. The Delano is that rare setting wherein both a bal masqué and a game of solitaire can seem utterly natural. In chat-happy South Beach, the meditative moment is a rare treasure.
Walking through the courtyard is like stepping into one of those Magritte paintings in which indoors and out are jumbled; heavy furniture is scattered about the lawn as if washed ashore from a yacht. A dining room set, complete with candelabra, sits under a palm; a brass bed, mahogany-framed mirror, and floor lamps are arranged at odd angles nearby.
The pool is a quiet triumph. Nowhere more than five feet deep, with café chairs set out in a cool ankle-shallow terrace at one end, it's a model of serenity. The lyrical mood continues as you wade, with classical music piped in underwater. (Guess what's playing.)
But at some point you'll be tempted to go out for a while, promenade down the avenues, cover a little ground. Venturing beyond the hedges onto Collins Avenue, you become aware of the Delano's rather fringy location, alongside the melancholy ghosts of an earlier Miami Beach: hotels with names like Sans Souci and Surf's Up; the bank clock flashing 5:97; a few cut-rate sandal shops. There's not much just outside the Delano, but that's irrelevant; you're really not supposed to leave. Lincoln Road Mall is nearby, however, and, just to keep all those crazy amoeba chairs in their place, Wolfie's delicatessen stands guard up the street.
After a swing through the shops at Bal Harbour and an espresso on Ocean Drive, you'll start to miss the Delano's foggy calm, and will want to hurry back. Maybe a workout at the David Barton gym; perhaps aromatherapy at the women-only rooftop bathhouse. Certainly a slice of quiche from the kitchen.
At checkout time I'm reluctant to leave my room's polished shell. My eyes have finally adjusted nicely. Just another hour, I say, to no one in particular.
Arriving as I'm walking out: a six-foot Christy Turlington double in vinyl mini; a family in flip-flops with two Mighty Morphin preschoolers and a teenage son trying not to gawk; and current MTV favorites Live, in for a concert at Miami Arena. During summer's calm before the storm, precocious scouts from Seventh Avenue, Stockholm, and Cedar Rapids are quietly sizing up the Delano, glancing at those lawn mirrors. They are all part of the strange Schrager formula, and they will all be there this month when the season really kicks off.
You, too, I would hope, before anything gets scuffed.
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