The Happy Hotel

Hank Stuever: Morris Lapidus — the late, great Googie master of South Beach-style architecture — was hired to design the Skyline Inn motor hotel in 1961, which is why it looks so spaceshippy, like it crash-landed six blocks south of the U.S. Capitol and failed utterly in its mission of alien invasion. By the 1970s, the hotel was thought of as ugly and so was the neighborhood.

This exact kind of ugly is perfect now.

But not retro!

The present owners? The somewhat famous Rubell family? They'll tell you how they hate putting quotation marks — a knowing (") with a (") — around what they're doing to the Capitol Skyline Hotel. They hate putting quotation marks around fun. That's the worst, when people act too cool, when there's a VIP list, when cocktails at a hotel pool get jacked up to $14 apiece and the DJ thinks he's the oonce-oonce-oonce messiah. They know there's a fine line here — they're from Miami — when the decor and atmosphere go too far toward the stylized. That's what the Rubells didn't want to happen here.