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Four Seasons Hotel at The Surf Club, Surfside

Surfside, Florida, United States · Four Seasons · Apex Luxury

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Harvey Firestone opened The Surf Club on New Year's Eve 1930, creating the private seaside room where Winston Churchill painted, Frank Sinatra held court, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor returned as regulars. Richard Meier's white towers now frame Russell Pancoast's restored clubhouse, with Thomas Keller's Michelin-starred restaurant in the old dining room.

About Four Seasons Hotel at The Surf Club, Surfside

History

The Surf Club was conceived in the late 1920s aboard a yacht. Tire magnate Harvey Firestone was sailing with friends — including Miami Beach developer Carl Fisher and businessman Irving Collins — past a stretch of golden oceanfront north of Miami Beach when the idea of a private members-only retreat took shape. Firestone engaged architect Russell T. Pancoast, one of South Florida's most accomplished practitioners of the Mediterranean Revival style, to design the clubhouse. Pancoast produced a composition of high vaulted ceilings, immense fireplaces, majestic colonnades, arcaded walkways, sunlit courtyards, and beachfront cabanas — all organized around a nine-acre oceanfront site in the then-unincorporated community that would take its name from the club itself. Construction dates to 1929-1930, and the Surf Club opened on New Year's Eve 1930.

Membership quickly attracted the most famous names of the Jazz Age and the decades that followed. Noel Coward, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Liberace, Tennessee Williams, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., the Duke and Duchess of Windsor — the club's membership and guest list read as a catalogue of twentieth-century celebrity and power. In 1935, thirty-five members of the Surf Club incorporated the Town of Surfside, essentially founding a municipality to protect the club's environment. During World War II, the U.S. Army Air Forces leased the building for use as officers' quarters. Winston Churchill, who spent six weeks in South Florida in 1946 painting seascapes during his recovery from the physical and political strains of the war years, spent considerable time at the Surf Club during that visit — a stay commemorated in the intimate Churchill Bar within the restored original clubhouse. In May 2011, the Miami-Dade County Historic Preservation Board officially designated the original clubhouse a historic site.

The club declined from the 1970s onward and the property was purchased by Fort Partners in 2012. They engaged Pritzker Prize-winning architect Richard Meier, whose crystalline white modernist aesthetic had defined some of the most important buildings of the late twentieth century, to design a new hotel and residential complex. Meier's solution was to place three transparent buildings — a hotel and two twelve-story residential towers — around the restored original clubhouse, framing and preserving the 1930 structure rather than displacing it. The interiors of the hotel were entrusted to Parisian architect Joseph Dirand, who created spaces that evoke the club's glamorous past in a contemporary idiom. Four Seasons Hotel at The Surf Club opened in 2017, with Thomas Keller reimagining the original dining room as The Surf Club Restaurant — the legendary chef's interpretation of the mid-century American supper club tradition. The property earned Forbes Five-Star and AAA Five Diamond recognition and was ranked among the World's Best Hotels extended list in 2025. Peacock Alley — the promenade corridor through the original building — has been meticulously restored, its colonnaded proportions and Mediterranean Revival details intact after nearly a century.

The setting

Four Seasons Hotel at The Surf Club, Surfside commands a nine-acre Atlantic estate at 9011 Collins Avenue on the original grounds of The Surf Club — opened on New Year's Eve 1930 by tire magnate Harvey Firestone and designed by architect Russell T. Pancoast in the Mediterranean Revival style. Winston Churchill painted seascapes from its cabanas in 1946; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Elizabeth Taylor, and Frank Sinatra were regulars. North Beach Oceanside Park is a thirteen-minute walk; Bal Harbour Shops, America's most productive luxury retail center, is two minutes by car, offering a seclusion between Miami Beach and Bal Harbour that defines the Surfside enclave. 5 miles from Museum of Contemporary Art. 15 miles from Miami International Airport.

Restaurants and bars

Experiences

Amenities

Awards

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