Blue-chip Special

For Her Clients’ Beachfront Retreat in Miami's Legendary Surf Club, Designer Delphine Krakoff Broadens Her Horizons With Dramatic Splashes of Color.

- Vicky Lowry

THE SURF CLUB OPENED ITS doors on New Year’s Eve, 1930, and from the outset, the Mediterranean Revival–style estate on Miami’s beachfront served as a celebratory oasis. Everyone from the Duchess of Windsor and Noël Coward to Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor could be found there lounging in the sun, sipping the club’s signature Mangareva cocktails, and enjoying poolside fashion shows, black-tie balls, and boxing matches. Today, a new generation of sophisticated sybarites is jetting to that fabled stretch of sand, which still retains the original clubhouse, thanks to a 21st-century vision of beachside fabulousness: a pair of glittering residential towers flanking a new Four Seasons hotel, all designed by Pritzker Prize winner Richard Meier, the virtuoso architect who is credited with conjuring some of the world’s most desirable contemporary high-rises devised for luxury living.

One cosmopolitan New York couple, who had previously resisted the impulse to own a beach house, came under the Meier-in-Miami spell. Even before the project broke ground, they purchased a unit on a lower floor and enlisted their longtime interior designer, Delphine Krakoff, to start working on plans. But when the couple toured what was still a construction site, they fell in love with the top-floor views and decided to go all in—trading the smaller unit for two combined apartments to create a vast seven-bedroom residence that spans the depth of the building, overlooking the windswept Atlantic Ocean in front and Biscayne Bay at the back, and large enough to bring together their children, extended family, and friends.