Art Deco Hotels, Checking Into the Jazz Age Around the World

From Miami Beach to Shanghai, the grand hotels that carried Art Deco geometry and glamour to every corner of the globe

Nowhere does Art Deco feel more alive than in a grand hotel lobby, and nowhere is the style’s reach more obvious than in how far its hotels traveled. Within a decade of the 1925 Paris exposition that gave the style its name, hotels in nearly every corner of the world were racing to build in it, chasing the same sense of speed, luxury, and modern optimism no matter the language spoken at the front desk.

In Miami Beach, that race produced the largest concentration of Art Deco buildings anywhere in the United States, a string of pastel hotels along Ocean Drive built through the 1930s by architects like Henry Hohauser and L. Murray Dixon. The Cavalier, built in 1936, is still one of the clearest examples, with its molded ceilings, terrazzo floors, and neon signage intact. A few blocks over, the Century Hotel carries the same beachfront pastel palette that defines the whole district. Miami’s version of the style softened its geometry into something tropical, all curved corners and porthole windows, built for a coastline rather than a skyline.

Top: Left: Bryant Park Hotel, New York, Right: Delano Miami Beach, pool and umbrellas. Bottom: Left: Delano Hotel, Miami Beach, Middle: Bottleworks Hotel, Right: Pendry Chicago

Elsewhere, the style bent to fit whatever city it landed in. Shanghai’s Fairmont Peace Hotel, opened in 1929 as the Cathay Hotel, became the most glamorous address on the Bund, and its lobby still holds a corridor of Lalique glasswork alongside a yellow glass rotunda that glows gold at night. Noel Coward wrote much of Private Lives during a stay there, and the hotel’s Jazz Bar has hosted the same nostalgic house band for decades.

London took a quieter path into the style. The Savoy, already decades old by the time Art Deco arrived, folded the new geometry into its existing Edwardian bones rather than starting over, nowhere more visibly than in the Pinafore dining room designed in 1926. Across the world in New Zealand, Napier took the opposite approach entirely. After a catastrophic 1931 earthquake leveled the city, it was rebuilt almost overnight in a single unified style, giving the world the small, cheerful Masonic Hotel and earning Napier its now-famous title as the Art Deco capital of the world.

Left: McAlpin Ocean Plaza, Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, Middle: The Georgian Hotel, Santa Monica, Right: Century Hotel, Miami Beach

Some of the style’s finest hotel work turns up in places rarely mentioned in the same breath as Paris or Miami. In Havana, the Hotel Nacional opened in December 1930 on a hilltop overlooking the Malecón, designed by the New York firm McKim, Mead and White in a mix of Art Deco, Moorish, and neoclassical styles that somehow reads as entirely Cuban, its gardens still holding the coastal defense cannons the hotel was built beside. In Asmara, Eritrea, a city built almost entirely under Italian colonial rule in the 1930s and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Selam Hotel stands among a remarkable concentration of Art Deco buildings that make up one of the most complete collections of modernist architecture anywhere in the world.

Top: Left: The Chatwal, lobby lounge, New York, Right: Fairmont Peace Hotel, hallway, Shanghai. Bottom: Left: The Savoy, private dining room, London, Right: Edison Ballroom, Hotel Edison, New York

What unites Art Deco hotels everywhere, whether clad in Miami pastel, Shanghai gold, or Havana stone, is not a shared look so much as a shared confidence. Each one was built by people who believed the modern age deserved a grand entrance, and nearly a century later, guests are still walking through the doors to see if they were right.