02 · Art Hotels
Fontainebleau Miami Beach
Miami Beach, Florida, USA
A 1954 resort by Morris Lapidus, curved in plan, with a staircase in the lobby that leads to a cloakroom
The lobby floor is laid in marble as a wide bow-tie pattern, dark against pale. A staircase rises from it in a single curve and stops at a landing that only holds a cloakroom. The columns beside it taper towards the floor rather than the ceiling, and the light fittings hang in long strings of glass beads.
Morris Lapidus finished the building in 1954 for the developer Ben Novack. The main block is bent into a shallow arc that faces the sea, so no room looks straight at its neighbour, and the curve follows the shoreline instead of the street grid. Later towers were added around the original slab, and a long restoration finished in 2008 returned the lobby, the bow-tie floor and the stair to the shapes Lapidus drew.
Collins Avenue runs past the entrance in the mid-beach stretch of Miami Beach, north of the Art Deco blocks of South Beach. Behind the building the sand runs to the Atlantic, with the beach walk passing along the back of the resorts. From the water the arc of the facade is easy to recognise.
Last gone over · June 2026
Three distances, one hotel: none of it is a promise about a stay. We work from published sources and say so plainly; the month at the foot of the page is when we last went over them.