Mayfair House Hotel & Garden

Mayfair House Hotel & Garden

At 3000 Florida Avenue in Coconut Grove, Miami's oldest neighbourhood and the one that still remembers its founding as a Bahamian settlement, the Mayfair Hotel & Spa opened in 1985 to the designs of Miami architect Kenneth Treister, who carved wooden doors by hand, cast copper into balustrades, and built an atrium garden into the centre of the building rather than around its edges, a decision that still governs how the hotel works today. The property closed for a two-year, fifty-million-dollar renovation by the New York studio Goodrich, reopening in September 2022 as the Mayfair House Hotel & Garden with 179 rooms, including 18 suites, no two of them laid out the same way, a Treister quirk that Goodrich chose to preserve rather than standardise. It sits a few minutes southwest of downtown Miami rather than in Miami Beach, general manager Lucy Martin overseeing a property she has described as built for artists and ideas rather than for the beach crowd it is a short drive from. Treister's atrium remains the organising fact of the interiors, an open-air courtyard of palms and greenery that the upper floor walkways look down into, with rooms finished in saturated colour, claw-foot tubs, vintage typewriters and outdoor showers in the larger suites, work commissioned specifically for the property by South Florida and Caribbean artists, including glass elevator panels by verre eglomise artist Jane Richardson-Mack, a lobby installation by Michele Oka Doner and a rooftop pool mural by Bahamian artist Angelika Wallace-Whitfield. Food runs through three outlets: Mayfair Grill for wood-fired, Southwest-inspired cooking, Fountain Lounge in the garden off the lobby for pan-Latin small plates from chef Giorgio Rapicavoli (Forbes named him one of its 30 under 30), and Sipsip Rum Bar on the roof, built around Coconut Grove's Bahamian roots with island cocktails and a soundtrack that runs to Harry Belafonte and Jimmy Cliff. There is a 1,060 square foot gym with Peloton bikes, 8,500 square feet of event space, and a mezzanine-level Treister Room for private dining that trades on the same hand-carved detail as the rest of the building . What it feels like is a piece of 1980s Miami that refused to soften into anything more generic, saturated colour and hand-worked material, where a lesser renovation would have gone to white walls and rattan, the kind of hotel where a claw foot tub and a vintage typewriter in the room read as continuity rather than a prop. It suits people who want Coconut Grove's slower, more residential register over Miami Beach's, and who find something to like in a hotel that commissions its art rather than buying prints, the crowd at Fountain Lounge running more local date night than hotel bar. You should not come if you want the pared-back minimalism that most of Miami's design hotels have settled into; Treister's original vision runs to maximalist colour and ornament, and Goodrich's update leaned into that rather than against it. You should come for a Coconut Grove address with real architectural history behind it, a garden courtyard that does the work most hotel lobbies only pretend to, and rooms that genuinely differ from each other rather than repeating a template. The short version: A 179-room Coconut Grove hotel inside Kenneth Treister's 1985 building, renovated by Goodrich NYC in 2022, built around an open-air garden atrium, saturated colour, and commissioned Caribbean and South Florida art.