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Miami's Hippest Pool Scenes
Terry Ward November 19, 2008
Take the plunge, fashionably
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Elsewhere on the East Coast, people are prepping for another workweek. But in South Beach, Saturday nights blur into Sundays, which morph into Mondays. Before it has even ended, the weekend is making a reprise.
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The ocean in Miami is a sapphire and turquoise parfait, and the beaches rife with tops-optional bikini enthusiasts. But the hippest just-add-water scene in South Beach plays out at hotel pools, where there’s a fete for almost every day of the week to lure hotel guests—and those non-guests ushered past the velvet rope on the basis of looks alone.
“The whole pool party scene is very Miami,” says Adam Rich, co-founder of Thrillist.com, an Internet lifestyle guide with a popular Miami edition. “And the thing that makes these parties official is that the hotels work with promoters to ensure a consistency of crowd and a consistency of vibe—it kind of makes regular what might ordinarily only happen by chance on a Sunday evening.”
And what’s regular in Miami is far from ordinary. Flat-screen TVs in cabanas, for example. Or personal tanning butlers on hand to smear beautiful bodies with sunscreen. Pool attendants ready to spritz the supermodel guests with mineral water.
At Gansevoort South, the hottest recent addition to South Beach’s hotel offerings, the rooftop pool, dubbed Plunge, even resembles a catwalk: a long, cool drink of water positioned18 floors above the South Beach masses, with 360-degree city and ocean views. Sleek cabanas glow lustily come nightfall, and the views from the open-air restrooms put the cityscape at your feet. Even when real fashion shows aren’t being staged at the Gansevoort’s pool, it’s a scene cut straight out of a fashion rag.
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“The pool scene is a little more loungey and a lot less casual than the beach scene,” says wedding planner Ana Cruz, a Miami native and star of the Style Network’s Whose Wedding is it Anyway? “Instead of casual dress and carrying your shoes in your hand, you’re going all out. You’re wearing your pumps and your party clothes—it’s a little closer to the club scene, with more formalized entertainment and great catering, too.”
Yvonne Castaneda, personal training manager at Equinox Fitness Club, which has several Miami outposts, knows exactly what it takes to look great in a bikini. “With the debut of Miami Vice, back in the day, it was the beginning of an image for Miami that we have to uphold—here, it’s the norm to look good. At some of the pools, if you don’t look the right way, you’re not going to get in.” Good thing you are guaranteed admission to the pool party if you are staying there.
“At The Raleigh, it’s like a nightclub, but during the day,” says Castaneda, “You have to look the part to get into the pool—that whole getting away with board shorts and a pair of flip flops won’t cut it.”
The pool area at The Raleigh goes beyond the curving fleur de lis of aquamarine water surrounded by Miami’s ubiquitous cabanas and daybeds (often called opium beds, for their lulling effect). The Sunday pool parties start early and go late. Dress to impress the South Beach doormen who run "face control."
Reserved for the exclusive pleasure of hotel guests, the scene at The Setai, a steel and glass nod to Zen tranquility located directly on South Beach, is tropical nirvana. Beach attendants rotate chaise lounges regularly to keep them square to the sun, and the hotel’s three pools, offering varying water temperatures, have lured many A-listers, including Gisele Bündchenand Tom Brady.
And making a comeback from its glory days during the Rat Pack era is the Fontainebleau Hotel, which underwent renovations in 2008 to the tune of $1 billion. Here, the freeform main pool is a reinterpretation of Morris Lapidus’s original bow tie design. Smaller dipping pools and a secluded oasis pool complete the sublime oceanfront scene.
“Growing up in Miami, I remember the popularity of this place—people loved going to the Fontainebleau with their families and renting a cabana for the day,” says Maria Argüello, Miami Community Manager for Yelp.com, an online community of local reviewers. “It’s good to see one of the grande dames come back.”
And what’s good news on South Beach’s pool scene for tourists is usually music to the ears of fun-loving locals, too, says Argüello. “There’s a certain person in Miami that I call the resident tourist. It’s a local-tourist hybrid, and these people love the hotel pool scene, too.”
