Courtesy Esmé
Of the many things Miami is synonymous with—excess, partying, glitz, sex, and sea—cute is not one that comes to mind. Cute, or its sibling charming, requires restraint. But on Miami’s South Beach on a street whose Old World buildings were the epicenter of the Roaring ’20s and later the backdrop of Miami Vice is a new hotel, the Esmé, that is the embodiment of cute and charming.
It is the latest selection for Beast Travel’s series on exciting new hotels, Room Key.
At the height of the Roaring Twenties, a pair of real estate developers turned a slice of Miami Beach into a Spanish city plaza. To step into Española Way with its arched stucco facades was to be transported somewhere other than the “new” city of Miami Beach. But over the years it became a den of iniquity where gangsters like Al Capone did business, and then it fell into disrepair. Decades of work restoring it and turning it into a pedestrian-only spot have returned it to its creators’ intentions.