The Pelican Hotel: Diesel’s eccentric Miami Beach landmark gets a revamp

It’s lunchtime and I’m on the terrace of Miami Beach’s Pelican Hotel gazing over the top of a martini at passers-by. The view is of Ocean Drive, Muscle Beach and then, behind mangroves, South Beach itself. “Vrooom,” goes a yellow Lambo. “Purr,” responds a Bentley. A cartoon muscular chap dressed only in shorts is using the road as a catwalk.

The Pelican has a prime South Beach spot, and is housed in one of the Art Deco buildings where tour guides like to stop. It’s pistachio green, with 32 rooms and no pool or spa.

That doesn’t matter. A star of the 1990s South Beach revival, it has just emerged from a two-year renovation, its famously eccentric rooms overhauled and brought back to a shimmering gloss. Four are entirely new; one of them — Ego Centric — boasts mirrored walls.

That’s a bit much for me; in South Beach I reckon it’s more fun to look at others. And sitting on the terrace of the Pelican — picking at cubed roast potatoes, the work of chef Wendy Cacciatori — feels very much the place to do it.

The hotel is owned by Renzo Rosso, founder of Italy’s Diesel fashion brand, who bought it in 1990. “My father got all the creatives at Diesel together and said, ‘Look, I want to do a hotel, but I want to do a hotel with many different expressions’,” his son Andrea tells me.

They decorated each room differently. My room, Lust in Space, has walls covered in white swirls on navy blue. Brought back to shimmering vibrancy during a two-year renovation, it will, I fear, induce a migraine. But I end up loving it (it’s big, at 502 sq ft), particularly the entirely new bathroom, with its soul-enhancing citrus tiling.

Lately, Miami has been on the up and is now being touted as the archetypal American city. It’s not really that Miami has changed — there is a bit more art around but it’s as brash and status-obsessed as ever — but rather that the US has moved its way (as have many of the country’s wealthy). It remains unrepentant, a vast strip mall floating in a froth of expensive boats where no one cares to talk about where the money comes from.

I take a walk along Ocean Drive with Mark Gordon, guest experience director of the Miami Design Preservation League. He points out that Miami Beach is a barrier island protecting Biscayne Bay and the city beyond. It was a mosquito-infested swamp until a couple of New Jersey entrepreneurs tried to create a coconut plantation in the 1880s.

When that failed, others saw a sultry version of Atlantic City and started building hotels. A hurricane flattened the place in 1926, and the 1929 crash rotted what survived. Then came the rise of a new American middle class, who, Gordon says, “were happy to spend a month’s salary on a week’s holiday”.

Hotels were built small due to the lack of elevators — still the preserve of the rich — and designed in tropical Deco following an exhibit at the 1933 Chicago world fair. Henry Hohauser, a star architect, created some 300 buildings, including several beautiful hotels, the Pelican among the last in 1948.

Miami Beach’s hotel frontages open like books with ziggurats and water symbols. Terraces look on to the street and, above, windows have thin, concrete “eyebrows” to keep out the sun.

But as the middle classes turned to Europe and the Caribbean, South Beach was taken over by pensioners looking to ease their winter bones. And then, in 1984, a Ferrari Testarossa pulled up and out stepped Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, Miami Vice’s Crockett and Tubbs.

The show’s creator, Anthony Yerkovich, saw an American Casablanca. “Miami has become a sort of Barbary Coast of free enterprise gone berserk,” he said at the time.

Miami Vice was a sensation. Gianni Versace consulted on its famous style and took note of an Ocean Drive mansion, Villa Casa Casuarina, that appeared in an early episode. It would become his global centre of partying.

“He bought it for $3mn and spent $33mn,” Gordon says as we stand in the shade of a palm on the other side of the road. “This is probably the exact spot his murderer waited for him.”

With Versace came the international fashion industry, including Renzo Rosso. In the hotel’s new penthouse, I speak to Andrea Rosso, Diesel’s “sustainability ambassador” and creative director of its home furnishing line, who oversaw the renovations alongside his father. The lounge has Warhols on the wall and is separated from the master bedroom by a large fish tank. A terrace looks out to a sea criss-crossed by pleasure boats.

Along the corridor are the new rooms. Old Glory is decorated entirely in denim, a tribute to Diesel’s famous stonewash. Green Boo is an expression of Andrea’s push for sustainability, with hessian walls, bamboo furniture and images of birds.

“We needed to renew many things because the hotel was getting old,” he says. “It was also the opportunity to add a freshness, and make it feel more contemporary.”

The most spectacular room is one of the originals, though, Executive Fifties. The staff say they want to match suites to the personality of the guests. If passing hours sitting on Executive Fifties’ wide mosaic window ledge and gazing at people pumping iron on Muscle Beach is your thing, this one’s for you.

“When I stayed in January I saw a Miami I didn’t expect,” Andrea tells me. “With a lot more culture than I had seen before. I saw an evolution.”

The city is growing increasingly foodie, attracting outposts of absurdly named super-restaurants — Sexy Fish, Dirty French. On my last night, a friend and I sit outside Calista, a new Greek place on the corner of Española and Drexel.

The table is next to the valet station, and we start to play a game of matching cars to drivers. A hefty bloke in Cuban bling walks up with a date in a sheer body stocking. Theirs is a Dodge Charger, suitably déclassé. A woman, magnificently encased in leather zipped up the back, quite rightly climbs into a Rolls-Royce SUV.

Miami Beach is for ballers, which makes it fun to visit. I worry a little for the residents: their search for physical perfection has the feel of body dysmorphia and the scent of anxiety.

But that fits perfectly with the Pelican’s new mirrored Ego room. Even without spending a night in there, in the morning I find myself looking down the menu of indulgent breakfasts on the Pelican’s terrace — Parma prosciutto, mozzarella, pancakes, French toast, pastries — and ordering granola. A Ferrari passes. Did the driver just mouth “loser”?

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