Sky Luxury Houses
Coral Gables does not shout. While Miami Beach works the cameras, the Gables planted banyan trees, wrote itself a Mediterranean building code in 1925 and waited. The result is the most elegant neighborhood in Miami — coral stone gates, canopy streets, plazas with fountains — and the reason our biggest house, Villa Coral Gables, lives here.
Saturday
Start at the Venetian Pool, a 1923 public pool carved out of a coral rock quarry, fed by spring water, with caves and waterfalls. It is the only pool on the National Register of Historic Places and it still costs less than a cocktail.
Walk Miracle Mile and the streets around it for lunch — Giralda Plaza is pedestrian-only and lined with terraces. In the afternoon, tour the Biltmore Hotel: the 93-meter tower is a copy of the Giralda in Seville, and the lobby, with its painted ceilings and cage elevators, is open to anyone who walks in confidently.
Sunday
Drive the canopy roads south to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden — 33 hectares of palms, rainforest and rare tropicals — then loop back along Old Cutler Road, one of the prettiest drives in Florida. End at Matheson Hammock, where a man-made atoll pool sits flush with Biscayne Bay and the skyline floats behind the kite surfers.
The point of staying here
A hotel puts you on a highway. A house in the Gables puts you inside the postcard: you drive out under the banyans, you come home to your own courtyard pool. Villa Coral Gables sleeps 16 across 7 suites — stone arches, a games room, a marble kitchen and a lawn with giant chess — from $2,899 a night, booked direct. Smaller group? The One Castle and Luxury Pool Villa are both a short drive south.
