I have a soft spot for hotelier Andre Balazs, who brought South Beach's Raleigh Hotel back to its original Art Deco grandeur
and then pushed and primped it into a very hip situation. I hadn't been
to the Raleigh in about 20 years, since it was a wreck with a Clorox
smell in the lobby and litter in the pool. But the Raleigh had been a
South Beach gem. Designed by Art Deco architect L. Murray Dixon in 1940, it overlooks the ocean with a streamlined, broad-shouldered elegance. 1940s Hollywood's mermaid movie star Esther Williams swam decorous laps in its keyhole pool (as did many other big names of the day, like Johnny Weissmuller). And the place always had a bit of Barbara Stanwyck to it: fast and alluring, yet classic and well-tailored.

Even
on Miami Beach, once the southernmost capital of cocktail shakers,
style can't be rubber-stamped. It has to be designed, which means it
first has to be understood. In this, Balazs got it. He thought of
everything when he refurbished the Raleigh. That famed pool is lit so it glows like a moon, every showgirl curve emphasized by spotlights.

The fluted columns in the lobby,
which always had a King Tut kind of vibe, have been carefully restored.
The lobby furniture is rich in Havana browns and glossy rattan,
clustered in discreet tête à tête groupings: There are lush palms and
banana plants, but not so many that they obscure your sighting of
Antonio Banderas with not-Melanie Griffith. In one corner is a 24-hour coffee bar and tabac, where the traveliciously wise Cathay Che and I fueled up before racing off to Style Wars.
I tried not to look so gee-whiz impressed by the sublime sea-green of
the cushions atop the chrome stools. But I lost it at the sight of the
potted orchid in the grand bathroom. In the face of refinement spiced
with exoticism, I start to feel a slow, delicious burn. With all its
keyhole archways and heavy-lidded soffits, the place is erotic.

A
word on restraint, a rare concept in South Beach. Art Deco South Beach
has been a calling card for decades; a tourist draw with all the
finesse of a theme park. By the 1980s, its great hotels sat crumbling
and mildewed (filled with the very same people who might in earlier
decades have danced in their ballrooms), their signs patched and in
some cases, crudely re-lettered. The more the area trumpeted the
hotels' style like some kind of carnival act — ART DECO,
screamed posters in pink and blue neon lettering — the more I realized
those old gems were in danger of being turned into the Disney version:
swellegance with no taste.

But Balazs gave the Raleigh back its
gams. As in legs. Done right to begin with, it was renovated right as
well. It doesn't feel dated. It just feels very expensive and
well-made. No one is going to scoff and say, Oh my gawd, it's so 2003. No one is going to say, Please, no more Deco clichés. So I credit him for helping South Beach to both trade on and transcend its stylized appeal.

Balazs
(if you pronounce his last name "ball ash" you'll sound like my
Hungarian grandmother) hasn't always hit his mark. But unlike the
debacle happening with the Royalton
now, he's got a sure hand in regards to style. Yet he makes me laugh.
Maybe it's that he has matinée-idol facial features on a slightly
over-sized head (it looks bigger when he wears a dark shirt, like a
boyish moon). Or the fact that when he dated my ex-neighbor, Uma Thurman, he often wore a shit-eating, Look at me grin in photographs. Others have poked some light-hearted fun at his veneer as well: In a 2004 New York Times piece on his boutique hotels,
Julie Iovine called his outfit of short-sleeve button-down and beige
pants "Prada's best orthodontic line." This son of Hungarian immigrants
thought he might be a sculptor, and wound up making stunner hotels
instead. Good for us.

Jana Martin is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Fashion & Design.