Please note: Children under 14 years old are not permitted on the property.

The long-awaited Standard Miami is here — and anyone who anticipated a carbon copy of the LA Standards will be in for a bit of a surprise. Still intact is the budget-chic philosophy — itself enough to raise an eyebrow or two in shamelessly glam Miami Beach — and unique to this particular Standard are a few novel solutions to the problem of shoehorning another big-deal hotel into the already packed South Beach scene.

First, the hotel is located off the main drag, on the quiet and mostly residential Belle Isle, along the Venetian Causeway just short of Miami Beach proper. A shuttle can deliver you to The Raleigh, very much in the thick of it, within minutes, but The Standard makes the most of its slight remove, such that it may furnish the kind of peace and tranquility that’s long since departed Collins Avenue. Well, relatively speaking, anyway — The Standard’s guests are not exactly wallflowers, and there’s always something going on in the bar; but compared to South Beach proper, this is practically transcendental meditation.

Second, and certainly related, is the spa, not at all a given in The Standard universe. Here not only are you comfortably sequestered from all the ballyhoo on the beachfront, but you’re surrounded by guests in Standard-issue white bathrobes, participating in the communal bathhouse culture of the place and indulging in mud ... more