Andre Balazs' Standard Hotel Miami
Former Lido Spa Hotel Gets Contemporary South Beach Makeover
Scandinavia meets old South Beach in this unique Art Deco refurbishment whose signature draws are its secluded location and its unique take on the day spa.
With the January 2006 opening of the Standard Hotel Miami, hotelier Andre Balazs has taken steps to revise the notion of the bathhouse by, among other things, leaving much of the spa hotel’s original character intact.
Lido Spa Days
You may remember the Standard in its original incarnation as the Lido Spa Hotel. Designed by Fontainebleau Hotel architect Morris Lapidus in 1953 on a secluded residential islet off the Venetian Causeway, the Lido remained for some 40 years an unapologetic throwback to an era when nobody put Baby in a corner. Senior citizens taking the waters between bouts of canasta became its stock in trade.
Old-is-New Bathhouse Culture
Balazs, who first visited the city 25 years ago, happens to like old South Beach. He also happens to like bathhouses, having frequented them in Sweden, and being an avid fan of the Russian and Turkish Baths in New York.
In our society, bathing is a reasonably serious and, whenever possible, home-based affair. Not long ago, in fact, the term "bathhouse culture" evoked images of steamy trysts between would-be gladiators.
Locker rooms tend to carry the vague whiff of pubescent humiliations.
Balazs aims to turn the town on to a more old-world notion of bathing, one where, as it was in the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, it’s a pleasurably social activity rather than a decadent indulgence or an insular act of tedium.
To this end, he’s created an adults-only (no one under 14 admitted), mostly nongendered space of seven treatment rooms and numerous indoor and outdoor baths, among them a hammam that also devotes daily hours to each gender, an aroma steam room, a cedar sauna, a waterfall hot tub, a 50-degree plunge pool, a mud lounge with chaises and a Wall of Sound shower—mini waterfall showers with new-age sounds and other ambient music piped in.
Retaining the Elements of 1950s South Beach
Balazs has left many of the trappings of the Lido intact—the terrazzo floors, some of the ceiling fixtures, the old Lido (the Standard sign is small enough to pass almost unnoticed) and the façade—and added touches that look like they should be original, such as a row of wooden slatted rocking chairs in the lobby, and Tiffany-style stained-glass in the front window. A lobby sign forbids the use of cell phones in the area.
South Beach Style at the Standard Miami
Some of the hotel is also devoted to what have become boutique-hotel staples, such as outdoor cabanas and the now de rigueur hotel-branded lounge music CDs. The Lido Restaurant and Bayside Grill, presided over by former Le Bernardin chef Eric Ripert, serves light Continental food such as grilled peasant bread with Serrano ham, salad Niçoise, roasted lamb, Greek mezze…and mini burgers.
The rooms are decorated simply in light woods. Each offers direct access to the baths, but some offer more access than others. Rooms come in five types, from Missionary (ground-floor rooms with garden views, US$245/night) to Full Spread, a 555-square-foot suite with its own sitting room, giant windows and a private terrace one quarter the size of the room facing out onto Biscayne Bay (US$850 per night).
Guests in robes are not an uncommon sight throughout the 105-room hotel, where the clientele has yet to ossify into a single identifying demographic. It’s a favorite with New York stylists on shoots, but also with New Jersey businessmen on vacation. Even the occasional holdover from the Lido days has been known to make a weekend appearance.
40 Island Avenue, Miami Beach, 305-673-1717.
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