Pastel colours and wicker furniture clash playfully with the leopard print fabrics in this Miami hotel, created by American designer Ken Fulk for musician Pharrell Williams.
The Goodtime Hotel, which was designed to reflect the famed art deco architecture of the local area, is a collaboration between Williams and entrepreneur David Grutman.
While Fulk was responsible for the interiors, New York firm Morris Adjmi designed the building and landscape architect Raymond Jungles worked on the hotel’s outdoor spaces.
“We want The Goodtime Hotel to impart a feeling of both revitalisation and that rare, exciting thrill that takes over when you discover something special,” said Williams, who has previously collaborated on the design of a two-tower residential development in Toronto.
“It’s that adrenaline-fuelled sensation of entering a whole new setting and a whole new mindset. This place will provide a natural good time for all who come through.”
Set in a central, historic section of South Beach along the neighbourhood’s Washington Avenue, visitors arrive at The Goodtime Hotel through a double-height archway placed within a corrugated facade.
Inside, an atrium entryway filled with plants and decorated with a hand-painted hothouse mural and art deco plasterwork leads to the lobby.
The hotel houses 266 rooms as well as 100,000 square feet of public space. This includes Strawberry Moon – a restaurant and 30,000-square-foot pool club – 45,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space, a gym and a glossy, peach-hued bar called the Library.
The rooms, which include a handful of suites, have either sunset views across Biscayne Bay or sunrise views out across the Atlantic ocean.
The interiors were decorated by Fulk in a “reimagined art deco” aesthetic to “recall the opulence and nostalgia of a time gone by”.
Custom bedding and bespoke drapes feature in the guest bedrooms alongside leopard-print benches and pink rotary dial phones. A carpet woven with a pattern of wet footprints runs along the corridors.
In the hotel’s restaurant and pool club Strawberry Moon, Fulk’s design concept channels Caribbean and Central American resort towns such as Havana and Acapulco that were popular around the mid-twentieth century.
This theme is translated into features such as striped pastel tiling, vintage scalloped bar seating and pinstriped awnings.
“When you arrive at the hotel and walk through our doors, it becomes a full-on experience,” said Grutman, who owns several Miami-based restaurants and night clubs through his company Groot Hospitality.
“When you’re at the Goodtime, we want you to feel like your worries and anxieties have been left outside.”
The Goodtime Hotel, which opened this month, is not the first project that Grutman, Williams and Fulk have worked on together.
In 2018, the trio collaborated to create the candy-coloured interior of Swan and Bar Bevy – a restaurant and bar in the Miami Design District.
Photography is by Alice Gao.
