Three historic hotels – three fabulous makeovers

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

New digs in the Design District

The Moore, Miami

Miami owes a lot of its distinctive 20th-century built environment to Florida’s famous 1920s Land Boom, when a slew of inward investment – the Sunshine State’s first property bubble – intersected with the vogue for art deco design. One of its best-known legacies is The Moore building, a four-storey furniture showroom and factory developed by architect and financier David P Davis, which rose in 1922 from a defunct pineapple plantation that would eventually become the city’s Design District. Apposite, then, that Craig Robins – the developer-entrepreneur largely responsible for that neighbourhood’s flourishing, as well as its art-world primacy (his own estimable collection is housed at the nearby Dacra headquarters) – has steered the transformation of what’s now known as The Moore.

Members’ club, tick; resident blue-chip gallery, tick; must-book restaurant (Elastika, named after the building’s Zaha Hadid-designed atrium installation and featuring the talents of chef Joe Anthony, who defected from New York’s Gabriel Kreuther), tick. And, naturally, a hotel befitting the rest: just 13 discreet suites, spread across the top floor. The smallest is a healthy 700sq ft; all are individually designed, the art curated by local adviser Monica Kalpakian. Guests have access to the members’ club and all its amenities, including programming with artists’ talks, visiting chefs and exhibitions. Bookings are open, though no guarantees there’s any Art Basel Miami Beach availability left in December… mooremiami.com, from $800

An eternal grande dame 

Hotel d’Inghilterra, Rome

Next year marks a papal Jubilee, and Rome is readying for its close-up. If you visit in the next few months, expect to encounter ramped-up chaos and more than a few famous monuments hiding behind walls of scaffolding. But build sites have been thick on the ground for some time: the city is in the midst of a spate of major hotel openings, ranging from a flagship for luxury powerhouse Bulgari to Six Senses, Edition Hotels and, imminently, Mandarin Oriental. Last month marked the return of one much-loved, quintessentially Roman address, after a year-long renovation that marshalled made-in-Italy artisanship from across the country to reconjure its historic primacy. The Hotel d’Inghilterra was constructed in the mid-16th century as a palazzino to house guests of papal bankers the Torlonias; it became a hotel in 1845, gaining near-instant cachet with the era’s A-listers (royals from all over, plus Keats, Byron, Shelley, and a steady flow of Grand Tour escapees). Its popularity endured well into the Dolce Vita years, with Gregory Peck and Liz Taylor among the guests, but began to fade in the early 2000s.

Now it’s back, with gleaming rooms and suites. Ornate passementerie and Italian marbles – some of them original 19th-century design iterations – abound; so do natural light and, in the suites on the fifth floor, spacious balconies. Downstairs at ground level are Café Romano and its adjacent bar, with tables set out on the Via Borgognona. For the high rollers, the top-floor penthouse suite can be connected to a second suite and a double room, forming a whole-floor apartment with its own 70sq m terrace giving onto epic views of the Eternal City. starhotels.it, from €800

A new chapter in Manhattan

The Surrey, New York

Manhattan’s historic hotels similarly sometimes play parts in the city’s larger story. The Surrey was built at the corner of 76th and Madison in 1926 as a residence hotel; among its famous long-stayers were Claudette Colbert, JFK and Bette Davis. As at Rome’s Inghilterra, by the 2000s the Surrey’s cachet was diminished; but the prewar bones and mint location made it the kind of asset that attracts major developers. Enter the UK-based Reuben brothers, who acquired the tower in 2020 and who have reopened it as The Surrey, A Corinthia Hotel.

Malta-based Corinthia will manage The Surrey’s 100 rooms and suites – designed by the talented (if near-ubiquitous) Martin Brudnizki – along with the 14 ultra-sleek residences across the building’s top floors. An outpost of Casa Tua, Miami’s high-gloss Italian watering hole, will occupy the lobby level; a members’ club sits on the second floor, and a landscaped terrace crowns the roof (for now, only for residents). The Sisley-run spa has steam and sauna rooms and a salt tepidarium; the gym, a terrace for outdoor yoga and relaxation and fitness classes. All in all, very “new chapter”-ready – though, thankfully still Old New York genteel in a few key ways, from the neat awnings to the liveried doormen. corinthia.com, from $1,260 

@mariashollenbarger