There’s more to Palm Beach in the USA than presidents and palatial pads — it’s the capital of fun
Palm Beach boasts the second highest density of billionaires in the USA, and they know how to party, says Sophia Money-Coutts.
The clue’s in the name: Palm Beach. There are palm trees and a long strip of beach. There’s also bright-pink bougainvillea on every house, jasmine in the air, singing mockingbirds competing with the gentle purr of the odd Rolls-Royce and roads with names such as Hibiscus Avenue and Coral Lane (Gulfstream Road, too, which is appropriately Palm Beach because almost everyone here owns one). Right at the centre of it all is the new, gleaming, bright-white hotel on the block, The Vineta.
It’s boom time in Palm Beach, but not necessarily for the reason you think. Sure, Donald Trump is often in town and holds court at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home and country club (the joining fee, cannily hiked shortly before his second presidential term began, is now $1 million).
However, the frenetic activity and influx into this surprisingly small, moneyed patch of America — which boasts the highest density of billionaires in the country, I’m told on my second night there — isn’t all due to him.
The Gatsby spirit glitters still amid the sunny, cocktail-soaked gardens of Palm Beach.
Think of it like the gold-rush to the Cotswolds. It’s a slightly glib comparison, but not entirely dissimilar. Californians and New Yorkers have flocked south to Palm Beach for more space, sunnier climes (at least, the ones from New York) and, crucially, more favourable taxes. This means that what has long been a wealthy area is now even more so.
It’s not possible, alas, to do a bus tour of the stars’ homes as you can in Hollywood, but take a walk up the lake trail and you’ll pass $50-million-plus house after $50-million-plus house. Drive around Palm Beach with a local and they’ll point out the Lauder house or Tom Ford’s house or the Peltz house, setting for the, ahem, controversial Brooklyn-Peltz wedding in 2022. Every other car is a Cullinan; a jar of jam in the new Bilboquet deli, a casual offshoot of the famous restaurant, will set you back $19.
This sunny spot has long been well served by swanky restaurants and members’ clubs that cost a cool half million or so to join. The likes of The Everglades Club, and Palm Beach Bath and Tennis have been here since Palm Beach started attracting the rich towards the beginning of the 20th century (on which more in a moment).
The famous pink Colony Hotel flung open its doors in 1947. However, other splashy openings are racing to keep up with demand. Polo kingpin Nacho Figueras opened The Polo Room restaurant last year. Über-exclusive members’ club the Carriage House, which opened in 2022 and is supposedly heavily influenced by 5 Hertford Street in London, has more recently jacked its joining fee to $400,000. Robin Birley has reportedly signed paperwork for a new club near Worth Avenue, which will be to Palm Beach what Maxime’s has become to Manhattan.
Cool, calm and comfortable, each of The Vineta's 41 rooms comes complete with pet menus.
Then there’s the new jewel, The Vineta, a hotel bought by the Reuben brothers, David and Simon, in 2022 and managed by the Oetker Collection, the group’s first foray into the USA. Not bad for an island that is pretty small: just under four square miles or, if you prefer, the size of Richmond Park.
However, it’s technically incorrect to call The Vineta new. The building has almost always been a hotel (save for a brief transformation into a condominium block), ever since it opened to tourists in 1926. It was briefly called The Vineta back in the day, then it moved through various hands until it became The Chesterfield in 1989 and attracted Margaret Thatcher, Catherine Deneuve and Sir Rod Stewart.
After a three-year building project, the aesthetic now is classic Palm Beach: creams and blues, the odd splash of pink, with rattan detailing, shell sconces on the walls, orchids and ferns beside thick Assouline coffee-table books and wall-to-wall marble bathrooms (I should note here that the presidential suite is the only room with a bathtub; Florida is shower territory).
The interiors were handed over to the Paris-based designer Tino Zervudachi, who has looked after other hotels in the group, including the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, France, and Eden Rock St Barths in the Caribbean. I have never before stayed in such a serene hotel room — more creams, more blues, rattan lampshades, fluted bedside tables — or a hotel room that has a menu that includes a page of injectables, should I need some. How about Nefertiti Neck, to smooth out those pesky lines? Or Trapezius Tox to relax my shoulders after the long flight?
From spiralling handrail to scalloped parasol, the swimming pool cries out to be photographed in its own right.
The swimming pool is sensational — destined to launch a million Instagram posts. Tino spent some time in Palm Beach doing his homework and it shows. The spiral pool handrails, for instance, are designed to match the swirl on the town’s famous Clock Tower, overlooking the beach. Coco’s, the hotel’s restaurant, features old-timers steak Diane and crêpes Suzette, which regulars from the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc may recognise. It all adds up to create a serene sense of continuity; the hotel may only just have opened, but it feels like a grande dame.
There’s also an in-room pet menu — including a ‘buddy burger’ beef patty with broccoli and rice for $18 or an ‘amuse pooch’ oatmeal cookie for $9. Every room (there are 41) is dog friendly. Palm Beach itself is extremely dog friendly. One morning, strolling the lake trail, I passed a chap in his eighties walking a Yorkshire terrier in a red MAGA cap. Moments later, I passed another with his poodle, in a navy MANA cap, worn by the other side; it apparently means ‘make America normal again’.
To glide through Palm Beach is to glimpse the glitziest and most glamorous of lives.
Walking is a good way to take in this place, because it’s small enough to explore on foot. Take a stroll down Worth Avenue and you’ll pass Chanel, Ferragamo and Palm Beach favourites Stubbs & Wootton (for slippers) and Lily Pulitzer (for tropical clothing). You’ll see plenty of Tesla Cybertrucks and perhaps even Mona Lisa. Not, I hasten to add, the painting, but a pig. One of the financiers has a pet pig, called Mona Lisa, whose walker takes her up and down the main drag every morning.
After that, I’d continue strolling to the Flagler Museum to brush up on Palm Beach history. Henry Flagler was the oil magnate and generous being who built the grand house that’s now a museum between 1900–02 for his third wife. He has been dubbed the ‘inventor’ of modern Florida for also constructing the railway that stretched the length of the state and allowed 19th-century travellers to discover this balmy patch of the USA. This was the Gilded Age, when it became fashionable for those who summered in Newport to winter down here.
Flagler constructed Palm Beach’s earliest glitzy hotels — the Royal Poinciana, The Breakers — and guests soon flocked. The architect Addison Mizner then rolled up his sleeves and started designing buildings in the style he’d become famous for, still evident across Palm Beach today: ‘Bastard-Spanish-Moorish-Romanesque-Bull-Market-Damn-The-Expense’, someone subsequently dubbed it. Houses and clubs that wouldn’t look out of place in Madrid, in other words, albeit with more tropical gardens. Palm trees, naturally, but also hibiscus, gardenias and plumbago. Colour is everywhere. Nothing is terribly subtle here.
'Are we talking endless charity parties for blind and impoverished dolphins?'
‘The Palm Beach season, then as now, was a time of parties, concerts and entertainment as visitors arrived for a respite from the cold winter weather in Northern states,’ notes a plaque in the museum, beneath a grainy photograph of the Flaglers hosting a tea party on their lawn, alongside their friends visiting from Britain, the Duke and Duchess of Manchester.
That was as correct then as it is now, as the season still exists in these parts and runs roughly from Thanksgiving, when everyone descends from the north, until Easter, when they return to the east coast. ‘It basically empties, it’s a ghost town,’ says a friend, of the summer months, when it’s too hot and humid to do much outside.
However, during the season, oof, remember your vitamins — because it is busy. Supper after supper, charity event after charity event. Are we talking endless charity parties for blind and impoverished dolphins, I ask my friend, assuming there are a good number of rich people here looking for a cause — any cause — to distract them from pilates ($68 a class) and all that golf? ‘Not all,’ she says, contemplatively, ‘although we did go to a charity event for dolphins the other day.’
I stop by one drinks party at a private home (with the usual army of uniformed staff) with martinis the size of fish bowls and a woman tells me she’s drinking as many as she can before speaking to her lawyer about her divorce that evening. That party was to raise money for local beaches. The next night, at another charity do, in aid of the mangroves, former model and heiress Amanda Hearst makes a speech about the importance of the ocean and I talk to a Norwegian who only mentions half an hour into our conversation that he’s a director. Quite a major director. He’s Amanda's husband, Joachim Rønning, and he’s directed a ‘Tron’ film as well as the last in the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ series.
Then it’s off to dinner at the Everglades; the next night, a supper at another private home by the pool. At least American dinner parties finish early, all wrapped up by 11pm. I developed a chest infection after several days here, despite the tropical warmth. London socialising is nowhere near as frenetic as Palm Beach in season.
In 1995, when property tycoon Frank Lahainer died in Palm Beach, the story goes, his widow Gianna had his body embalmed and kept at a funeral home for more than a month, so she didn’t have to skip any parties. ‘Why would I wait?’ Gianna reportedly said, ‘I would miss the season.’ Quite right.
This is a party town — and the fun must go on.
Rooms at The Vineta start from £735 per night on a B&B basis, excluding taxes. Click here for more information and to book.
