Cavalier South Beach Hotel

While most of Miami Beach’s Art Deco hotels from the 1930s embraced streamlined curves and nautical whimsy, architect Roy F. France designed the Cavalier in 1936 with a more restrained elegance. France, who essentially created Miami Beach’s skyline after a 1931 trip to Florida convinced him to relocate there for good, had a simple design philosophy: “Let in the air and sun. That’s what people come to Florida for.” The Cavalier stands as one of Ocean Drive’s originals, more serious than its funky neighbors yet still part of the world’s largest collection of Art Deco architecture.

France arrived already trained: born in Hawley, Minnesota, he’d spent his early career designing apartment buildings around Chicago and Evanston before that trip south changed his plans for good. Once in Miami Beach, he designed dozens of the hotels that would come to define it, the Cadillac, the Saxony, the Edgewater, and later the National, whose 14-story tower is as much his signature as anything on Ocean Drive. The Cavalier came early in that run, built in 1936 as one of the strip’s first hotels.

Where his contemporaries reached for curved corners and porthole windows, France dressed the Cavalier in decorative stucco friezes, patterns influenced by the recent excavation of King Tut’s tomb and the temples at Chichén Itzá, arranged in Art Deco’s favored rule of three to draw the eye upward along the facade. It reads as more architecture than ornament, which makes it either the most serious building on Ocean Drive, or the most restrained one, quietly pretending not to notice how much fun its neighbors are having.