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Hotel Colonnade Coral Gables, Autograph Collection
Coral Gables, Florida, United States · Autograph Collection · Accessible Luxury
Phineas Paist, fresh from Vizcaya, raised the Colonnade Building in November 1926 as George Merrick's sales office for Coral Gables, a City Beautiful experiment carved from a grapefruit grove. The boom collapsed the same year, and the rotunda later trained pilots, shot movies, and sewed parachutes in World War II. Today's 157-room Autograph hotel still wears Paist's columns one block from Miracle Mile, with the 1924 Venetian Pool a short ride away.
- 157 rooms
- Opened 1926
- Neighborhood: Miracle Mile
- Rooms from 409 sq ft (38 m²)
- Architect: Phineas Paist
About Hotel Colonnade Coral Gables, Autograph Collection
- The hotel's Lobby Bar sits beneath stained glass and Murano chandeliers.
- During World War II, the building's rotunda served as a parachute factory.
History
The Colonnade Building in Coral Gables is inseparable from the story of the city itself. George Merrick, whose family had converted their grapefruit plantation into the raw material of a grand urban vision, began developing Coral Gables in 1922 out of the City Beautiful movement, a planning philosophy that held that civic aesthetics could elevate public life and that architecture should announce the moral seriousness of a community. Merrick's Coral Gables would be a planned city in the European mode, all Mediterranean Revival architecture, uniform setbacks, and streets named after Spanish provinces.
The Colonnade Building was the centerpiece of that vision. Designed by the distinguished architect Phineas Paist, who had worked on Vizcaya, the grand Gilded Age estate on Biscayne Bay, and completed in November 1926, the building served as Merrick's sales office for the Coral Gables development, the literal headquarters of his city-building enterprise, positioned at the heart of the shopping district along the street that would become Miracle Mile. Its soaring columns, ornate arches, and Beaux-Arts detailing with Floridian inflections made it the most architecturally ambitious commercial building in a city designed to be nothing but architecturally ambitious.
The timing was catastrophic. Florida's real estate boom collapsed in 1926, the same year the Colonnade opened, followed by a catastrophic hurricane that further devastated South Florida's economy. Merrick's empire dissolved. The Colonnade Building, built to sell a city, found itself in a city that was no longer selling. Over the following decades it cycled through improbable identities: a pilot training facility, the Colonnade Movie Studios, and during World War II, a parachute factory, its grand rotunda and column-lined halls repurposed for industrial production.
The building was eventually incorporated into a hotel complex, with a modern hotel tower constructed behind the historic rotunda facade. The Colonnade has operated as a hotel under various flags, and the historic 1926 structure has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Today it operates as Hotel Colonnade Coral Gables, Autograph Collection, taking its place alongside the Biltmore and the other surviving monuments of Merrick's grand design. The building's exterior still draws pedestrians on Miracle Mile who stop to look up at what George Merrick imagined when he looked at a grapefruit grove and saw a city.
The setting
Hotel Colonnade Coral Gables, Autograph Collection occupies 180 Aragon Avenue, one block from Miracle Mile in George Merrick's 'City Beautiful', the Spanish Mediterranean municipality he incorporated in 1925 as one of America's first planned cities. The hotel painstakingly echoes the adjacent 1926 Colonnade Building, designed by Phineas Paist with Spanish Colonial and Baroque detailing, whose rotunda once housed Merrick's land sales office at the height of Florida's legendary boom. Miracle Mile's dining and boutiques are footsteps away; the Venetian Pool, a 1924 coral-rock quarry pool listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is twelve minutes by transit. 4 miles from Villa Vizcaya museum. 12 miles from Miami Beach.
Restaurants and bars
- Aragon Café — Café · American
- The Lobby Bar — Bar
Amenities
- Spa
- Pool
- Hot tub
- Fitness center
- Pet-friendly
Awards
- AAA Four Diamond (2026)
Open Hotel Colonnade Coral Gables, Autograph Collection in the atlas for live weekend rates, photos, and the full folio.
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