Miami Design Villa | VILLA CONTENTA: A PALM ISLAND STORY – Sep 2016 | |
If the interior elegance that simmers every turn in this sprawling Palm Island estate overlooking Biscayne Bay in Miami Beach, Fla., calls to mind Versailles, noble apartments in the 16th arrondissement or the playgrounds of the striking Madame de Pompadour, then your sensibilities are in line with the dream its designer had hoped to create. Corinne Sananes, head of the design department at Romeo Royal Gallery, is not only the designer of the 9,893-square-foot estate name “Villa Contenta,” she is the muse of Romeo galleries and partner of owner Claude Dalle, founder of the renowned showrooms and ateliers in Paris and Cannes that create an interior world of luxury, panache and enduring elegance. (more…) |
Posts Tagged ‘Miami Beach’
FLORIDA DESIGN’S MIAMI HOME AND DÉCOR
Tuesday, September 27th, 2016Miami: Your autumn pick-me-up
Tuesday, October 8th, 2013It should come as no surprise that travelers often cite fall as the best time of year to experience Miami. Although much of the country begins to cool down in the month of October, the average high temperature in Miami sits around 85 degrees (approx. 30 Celsius). With tourist season long past, there’s also more freedom to enjoy the true Miami lifestyle (think ample beach space). If you’re still planning your fall Miami getaway, Villazzo still has some of its signature VillaHotels available.
Featured:
1. Book Villa Azza (above): A modern and tropical waterfront escape on Palm Island (starting at $5,700 per night)
TLC – FOUR HOUSES
Tuesday, January 1st, 2013The Hot Places to Eat and Drink During Your Miami Vacation
Sunday, August 21st, 2011Jeff McInnis via Haute Living |
Visitors flock to Miami for many reasons; sun and sand, art and culture, the vibrant nightlife. If you’re planning a Miami luxury villa rental vacation you have the option of eating in your own state-of-the-art kitchen or venturing out to find your meal in one of Miami’s celebrated restaurants. There are classics–Joe’s Stone Crabs, Nobu, Palme d’Or–and trendier locales, not to mention a variety of different cuisines.
Like in most big cities, in Miami new restaurants from big name chefs are cause for a ton of buzz and anticipation. One such chef is Jeff McInnis, who disappointed many Miami diners when he left his post at Gigi’s earlier this year. Miami’s Top Chef has now been tapped for the new Yardbird Southern Table and Bar, which according to its website, is set to open in Fall 2011 at 16th and Lenox on South Beach. If the restaurant stays on schedule (reports have it opening in September), you’ll be able to give it a try if you head to Miami for your luxury villa rental location in the off-season or in time for Art Basel.
Five Napkin Turkey Burger – Photo by billwisserphoto.com via The Miami New Times |
Michelle Bernstein is another chef with a high profile on the Miami dining scene. Bernstein’s new offering, Crumb on Parchment, may be laidback but it is attracting well-heeled lunchers and foodies alike. The restaurant on 3930 NE Second Avenue has a café-style vibe, serves all day breakfast and scrumptious options like classic baked goods (delicious chocolate chip cookies) and elevated lunch food (tuna sandwiches served with kimci aioli and spicy pickles). While a luxury villa rental is the perfect place to throw a bash, Crumb is also a site to consider for a private party, especially one where food wrapped in parchment and utensils served up in pails only adds to the charm and ambiance.
Having a cup of coffee brewed in the state of the art kitchen of your luxury villa rental is a great way to the start the day or unwind at night, but where to go for your java fix when you’re out and about in Miami during the day? To answer that question HauteLiving.com has published their picks for the Top Five Coffee Shops in Miami: Café Demetrio, Nespresso, David’s Café, Pasion del Cielo and Versailles. Of the five we’re partial to Demetrio’s gorgeous location and gourmet brews.
And, lastly, if you’re looking for some more casual dining you’ll be happy to know that Miami has been overrun as of late with gourmet burger joints. Take Shake Shack, for instance, which just announced its opening another location in Coral Gables. The Miami New Times recently compared the newly opened Five Napkin Burger (located on Lincoln Road) to BGR the Burger Joint, which is on Miracle Mile. The results? According to the critic Lee Klein, BGR has the better “signature beef burger,” while Five Napkin wins when it comes to turkey burgers. And that’s the beauty of Miami–high or low, luxury or laidback, the city really delivers.
Villa Contenta, seen here, is just one of the gorgeous luxury villa rental options that Villazzo offers for the Miami area. Visit Villazzo.com for information on the different villas available, their unique features, stunning locations and modern amenities.
Miami Beach In October: Fashion, Wine, and the Prelude to Luxury Villa Rental Season
Saturday, September 4th, 2010Luxury Villa Spotlight: V Villa Julia in Miami Beach
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010Luxury villas are a dime a dozen in Miami Beach, and few really stand out among the crowd. But Villazzo’s V Villa Julia’s design, décor,
and features bring the very best that Miami Beach has to offer to your own vacation experience.
Few luxury villas in Miami Beach capture the sun, sea, and warmth quite like V Villa Julia. Decorated in bright, inviting textures and featuring an open design both inside and out, this luxury villa lets in the light and natural beauty of this 5 bedroom, 5 bathroom bayside property seep into your luxury vacation. Large windows highlight the living and dining areas as well as the kitchen and bedrooms, giving you an enchanting view of the bay, pool, and terrace night and day. Luxurious bedrooms with sitting areas and en suite bathrooms making going to sleep and waking up a pleasure.
Outside, V Villa Julia luxury villa features a multi-level terrace – perfect for outside dining and entertaining – as well as a vanishing edge pool with cascading waterfall, barbeque area, and a bayside dock. And because it’s just 5 minutes from the beach, V Villa Julia has everything you need from a luxury villa to experience the very best of Miami Beach.
In recent years, the contemporary design movement has overtaken Miami Beach, and though this exclusive neighborhood of luxury villas boast modern, sprawling, mansion-sized homes, many of them appear as pastiche recreations of authentic contemporary Miami properties. Julia, however, features a layout that is seldom seen in recent luxury villas in Miami Beach: it connects the interior with the exterior by way of its capacious windows and tasteful decor.
Around every corner, you’ll find a minimalist yet inviting set of furniture, housewares, and design elements, most of which are done in white or beige. This bright, blank color palette, however, perfectly complements the rich, colorful palette of the outside landscape, which pours into virtually every square foot of this luxury villa by way of its windows. As you can see from the photo to the right, palm trees, blue skies, and the bay serve as the color throughout V Villa Julia.
Article by Michael Nace
Can You Really Trust Luxury Villa Rental Companies?
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010Luxury villa rentals in St. Tropez, Marbella, Miami Beach, and beyond offer the privacy and exclusivity that you cannot get from even the most expensive 5-star hotel. But is the risk of picking a “luxury lemon” worth giving up on a reliable luxury hotel experience?
Wherever there is sand, sun, and sea in the world, you’re bound to find a crop of luxury villa rentals to choose from. Whether it’s St. Tropez, Marbella, Miami Beach, or Ibiza, you can always find a huge selection of amazing rental properties that span traditional to contemporary architecture and that will put you in the middle of the action and nightlife as well as the middle of nowhere. For those who have a already made a few trips to these exclusive vacation havens and have tried out a few different hotels, the prospect of having their own private luxury villa seems like the next logical step in experiencing the ultimate luxury vacation.
However, with luxury villa rentals, there is always an unknown quantity — or, more specifically, an “unknown quality.”
Luxury villa rental companies are notorious for showing only the best aspects of the luxury villas they list. Sure, they might show a bunch of photos of a villa’s pristine pool, charming terrace, and well-appointed master bathroom. But they fail to show how the plasma TV doesn’t work, or how the villa’s wall that faces the seaside is crumbling, or how the bathroom hasn’t been renovated for 25 years.
I recently read an article about “how to choose a luxury villa rental in Tuscany.” The writer told a hilarious yet tragic story about how once he had chosen a majestic Tuscan villa to stay in, thinking that it would be a single-family luxury vacation rental. When he arrived, he was dismayed to find out that the villa, “had been carved up into apartments with thin dividing walls.” He paints a miserable Tuscan vacation in that villa, saying, “One doesn’t go to Italy to be woken by renditions of Take Me Home, Country Road – at 6am, in German.”
Oh, the horror!
This writer’s article, as well as many others who write about the luxury villa rental market, go on to list all of the due diligence required to ensure that what you see is what you get when choosing a luxury villa rental. In order to ensure a high quality villa rental, writers suggest so much comprehensive research and scrutiny over a property that you would be completely exhausted by the end of the search! Some writers suggest finding a contact in the city that you want to stay in and paying them a small sum of money to independently check out the villa rental you are considering. Another writer suggests that you “pack a small tool kit and a cache of batteries in various sizes (for TV remote controllers, torches and the like; never presume a villa’s inventory will be complete).”
Who is going to pack a tool kit for a vacation in a luxury villa rental?
The only way you can truly assure yourself an amazing villa vacation experience that lives up to your expectations is to work with a luxury villa rental company that visits and hand-selects the villas that it offers. If you use this criteria to select luxury villa rental companies to work with, you’ll find that there are very few of them in the world today who can vouch for the properties that they list on their websites.
For example, Wimco Villas, which is one of the largest luxury villa rental companies in the industry, offers this vague explanation in the “About Us” section of their website: “Each [Wimco] staff member is required to visit several of our vacation destinations each year and familiarize themselves with the villas and hotels there so they can serve you better.” How many is “several,” exactly? Which villas listed on their site have been visited and inspected, and which ones have not?
Other luxury villa rental sites, such as Jetsetter, use a small logo on their property pages to show prospective clients which of their properties have been checked and visited by a staff member and which have not. This is a much more transparent way of finding luxury villa rentals that you can trust to live up to what is posted on a website. Of course, it also limits the number of “safe” luxury villa options to choose from.
However, smaller, ultra-exclusive villa rental companies, such as Villazzo, guarantee their entire list of luxury villa rentals. Companies like these hand-select the properties they offer, and usually maintain an office in all of the vacation destinations where they offer luxury villa rentals. This is by far the best way to find the luxury villa of your dreams, since you can be assured that the villa has had a thorough walk-through and is determined to be a property that lives up to the high standards of the company that lists them on their website.
So, the next time you go in search of a luxury villa rental online, remember to look for a company that offers the best guarantee of quality, and the largest selection of luxury villas that have been hand-selected and approved. Stick to this approach and you can be assured that you won’t have to bring a toolbox with you on your next vacation!