HOTELS

Delano Hotel Miami Beach

You finally get in. You flinch as the glowing end of a stranger's cigarette brushes against your shoulder blade. Piercing cat eyes flick over you briefly and glance away as you inch toward the bar in the quixotic expectation of actually holding a drink before midnight. The bare, silver-tasseled orbs of an alien-being glow spookily before you and then disappear.

Against a techno backdrop, someone's Manolos misfire; there is collateral damage. No, you're not in a Philip K. Dick novel, you're at Suzanne Bartsch's New Year's Eve party at the Delano and you're having the time of your life.

However, on less frantic evenings, say, the other 364 nights of the year—Ian Schrager's hotel maintains a laid-back, edge-of-the-world boutique serenity. So calm; so white; so Philippe Starck.

At the curved driveway entrance, white-clad valets hasten to the care as their door brethren spring to attention. A high-ceilinged lobby, where filmy white curtains sigh in the ever-present breeze, leads slowly past hypermodern, overstuffed furniture (high-backed twisted chairs, a furry ottoman, a Dali chair), the Blue Sea raw bar, the Rose Bar and the Blue Door restaurant directly onto an outdoor patio. Further out is the pool and then the ocean. Everything reinforces the hotel's twin motifs: Cool. White. (P. Diddy, dressed all in white by the pool, was once mistaken for a cabana boy and was asked to fetch a towel.)

After the splendor of the lobby, the white-on-white room, with a giant full-length mirror against one wall, is surprisingly small and, at a starting price of almost $300/night, minimally equipped -- a shower stall rather than a bathtub, items like shampoo and sunscreen available for sale. There are eccentric touches, such as a single green apple laid on the turned-down bed at night, but this is not a room where a celebrity has lain her head. Queen Latifah stays in one of the pool-area bungalows; Madonna stays in the penthouse—usually. During her 'drowned World? tour this summer, her entourage all stayed at the Delano, while she rented a house that she had, in the words of Page Six, 'delano-ized,? i.e., she was attended to by Delano staff.

The hotel room itself is simply not the point; the lobby, the pool—these are the points. At the 150-foot long pool, where classical music is piped in to be heard underwater, you might easily spot KD Lang, Harrison Ford, John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, Puffy, Oprah, Calvin Klein, George Clooney, Rande Gerber, David Caruso, Lars Ulrich, Oliver Stone or one of myriad Hollywood lights; furthermore, at the pool you can easily strike up a conversation with one of them. This is the great leveling influence of the Delano pool, since its use is restricted to hotel guests (there's even a bouncer of sorts to keep the hoi polloi from wandering in off the beach), the assumption is that if you're staying there, you're worth talking to.

Normally, the celebs are discreet, but the Delano has had more than its share of bad-boy moments, most recently when Artists Direct Records A&R exec Gary Harris was asked to leave the hotel after other guests complained about the loud rap music coming from his room. On the less litigious side, Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit met local club owner Alan Roth at the Delano and was so impressed with him that he whisked him away to LA for a weekend romp at the Playboy Mansion.

At night, the lobby is candle-lit, and one of many parties is likely to be in full swing—the weekly Wednesday-night cocktail party at the Rose Bar, which has its own signature drink, the Rose Martini (rose-infused gin, a splash of cranberry juice and a white rose-petal garnish), and attracts an exclusive-even-for-South-Beach crowd; the Friday night 'shaken, Stirred and Rolled? martini and sushi cocktail hour from 5:30 p.m.-7 p.m.; the weekend "Barefoot Grill under the Stars" from 7:30 p.m. -11:30 p.m. (shrimp, fish or steak, salad and dessert, $40/person); or the intimate monthly six-course wine dinners held at the Blue Door, $95/person, 40 people maximum.

The Blue Door—no blue, no door—actually serves up some imaginative offerings such as the foie gras burger (duck liver with caramelized onion and ketchup on a small bun), blue crab with guacamole, jumbo shrimp with tempura leeks and pomegranate sauce, and giant ravioli stuffed with taro-root mousseline in a wild-mushroom sauce, but with the discreet rubber-necking, not to mention the high per-capita bulimia quotient, the diners tend to notice everything but the food.

On the penthouse level of the 238-room, 16-story hotel is the spa, Agua. Walking into the Agua is a bit like walking into the Hollywood version of heaven—a suffused white light emanates from every surface, gauzy drapes shroud the partitioned areas, and calm, smiling women walk softly, speak in whispers, and offer an array of facials, massages, polishes and baths that can also be arranged on the beach.

There's also a David Barton gym on site, but for real exercise, best to just to move a few pawns on the life-size chess board in the garden, sip a Rose martini, and day-dream about what to wear for New Year's Eve. 

Life is good at the Delano.