Inside Palm Beach’s Most Chic Colony Hotel

Few addresses in American resort life carry quite the weight of the Colony Hotel on Palm Beach's storied Worth Avenue corridor — a six-storey confection in blush pink that has defined a particular strain of Floridian elegance since its opening in 1947. The hotel undertook a considered restoration with Kemble Interiors, the Palm Beach firm founded by Mimi McMakin, whose instinct for the town's brand of sun-drenched, faintly theatrical glamour is unmatched. The resulting lobby — its walls enveloped in a custom de Gournay wallpaper drawn from a vintage postcard of the property — is an exercise in coastal maximalism held in perfect, light-handed balance.

At the centre of that room stands the piece that gives the space its spine: a towering three-tiered pagoda mantelpiece, hand-carved by The Raj Company in close collaboration with Kemble Interiors. Crafted with the kind of intricate detail that rewards close attention, the mantel anchors the lobby as its defining architectural gesture. As Kemble Interiors founder Mimi McMakin noted of the piece, her ambition was for it to become "almost as iconic as the clock at the old Biltmore" — a landmark around which guests would instinctively gather. By all accounts, it has.