In addition to service and luxury, a great hotel offers an immediate sense of place. Could The Breakers be anywhere other than in Palm Beach?
Garden & Gun magazine, that beautiful monthly chronicle of what’s new and cool in the The South has come out with a list of new Southern (and OK, Caribbean) hotels that are as stylish as they are dazzling reflections of their locations.
Making the list is The Thompson, a new hotel on the once-again-fashionable northern end of Miami Beach. The retro beach chic look of the pet-friendly hotel is meant to remind us of the ’50’s, when the neighborhood was the the hang-out of the Rat Pack. There’s even a Carmen Miranda suite. Michelle Bernstein, the former chef at the Omphoy Hotel (now Tideline Resort and Spa) helms the kitchen at the hotel’s Seagrape restaurant.
Another hotel on the list has a Palm Beach connection, although it’s located a thousand or so miles south. The Playa Grande Beach Club on the Dominican Republic’s north shore was designed by Celerie Kemble, who grew up in Palm Beach and whose mother, Mimi McMakin, is the founder of Kemble Interiors. Designed in a colonial style with gingerbread fretwork, copper soaking tubs and a soft pastel palette, the nine bungalows were created to look like they’d been around for decades, Kemble has said.
The list includes other new hotels in the Carolinas, Virginia and Savannah.
