Biltmore Hotel

Biltmore Hotel

Coral Gables, Florida, twenty minutes from downtown Miami and a five-minute drive from Miami International Airport, is where George Merrick, the developer who built Coral Gables out of wetland and called it the City Beautiful, joined the hotel magnate John McEntee Bowman to raise a $10 million resort in under fourteen months, announced in November 1924 and opened to 5,000 guests, among them Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. and Eddie Rickenbacker, in January 1926. The architects Leonard Schultze and S. Fullerton Weaver, whose New York firm would go on to design the Waldorf Astoria, modelled the hotel's 315-foot copper-clad tower on the Giralda in Seville, made it the tallest building in Florida for two years, and wrapped it in a Mediterranean Revival complex of 271 rooms, 174 of them suites, set on 150 acres that include a Donald Ross-designed 18-hole golf course. The building survived the 1926 hurricane, served as a Second World War convalescent hospital and later a University of Miami medical campus until 1968, stood empty for over a decade, and was restored by the City of Coral Gables and reopened as a hotel in 1987, restoration work that continued through 2002; today it is run by Seaway Hotels Corporation, under president and CEO Tom Prescott. Inside, hand-painted frescoes and barrel-vaulted ceilings run through a lobby lined with Corinthian columns and original terrazzo floors, uncovered and restored after decades under hospital linoleum. The 23,000-square-foot pool, once the largest in the world at 600,000 gallons and once patrolled by a young Johnny Weissmuller between swim meets, remains the hotel's centrepiece, alongside a 60-foot colonnaded courtyard built around a marble fountain. Palme d'Or, the hotel's AAA Five Diamond dining room, serves French cooking under a Michelin-starred kitchen; Fontana, open onto the courtyard, does Italian; Cascade handles poolside lunches. A 2017 renovation by D'Shakil Designs and Studio 5 brought the lobby's furnishings current without touching the frescoes or the columns. The Biltmore reads more like a small city than a hotel, in the best sense and occasionally the more tiring one: golf carts cross the property, wedding parties spill from the courtyard on weekend evenings, and the tower tours run on a schedule as fixed as check-in. Stay in one of the tower suites and the scale and ornament are hard to argue with, the kind that a hundred years of newer hotels have mostly given up trying to replicate; stay in a standard room in one of the wings and the experience tips closer to a well-run resort with an exceptional backstory. The staff have told the Al Capone story more times than they can count, and they still tell it well. You should not come to the Biltmore for quiet. This is a property built for spectacle, in near-constant use for weddings, galas, and golf outings, and the corridors of the wings can feel closer to a convention hotel than a boutique one. You should come for the Giralda tower itself, for a pool with a documented hundred-year history, for Palme d'Or on a night booked well in advance, and for the specific feeling of walking through a lobby that was gutted for a military hospital, left empty for a decade, and rebuilt stone by stone, not reproduced from scratch. The short version: A 1926 Schultze and Weaver hotel in Coral Gables with 271 rooms, a Giralda-inspired tower, and a hundred-year history spanning hurricanes, hospital wards, and Al Capone.