Palm Beach’s Most Legendary Hotel Just Received the Pastel Makeover of Our Dreams 🌴
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Few hotels are as Palm Beach as the tony Florida beach town’s Colony Hotel. Since 1947, the plush lodge has welcomed guests like Judy Garland, Lena Horne, Frank Sinatra, John F. Kennedy, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor into its pink-tinged embrace.
But after 75 years in service, a building is bound to incur some wear-and-tear. Sarah Wetenhall, the Colony’s owner since 2016, was amazed to find that there wasn’t a unified design theme throughout its 89 rooms, making it difficult to make even the most basic of touch-ups. “We didn’t even have a cohesive paint color for each room so fixing nicks here and there was a nightmare as we’d have to match a different paint color to each one," Wetenhall tells us.
A makeover for the beloved hotel, which was previously owned by Wetenhall’s late father-in-law, was in order—one that would honor its past, make maintenance more manageable, and also introduce fresh new decor ideas that would excite guests. Thus, Wetenhall turned to her design partner in crime, Palm Beach native Mimi McMakin of Kemble Interiors, to come up with four different room schemes.
After a successful collaboration on the Colony’s lobby, with its Instagram-famous custom de Gournay wallpaper, McMakin was the perfect choice. The designer landed on four hues—pale green, ocean blue, sky blue and Palm Beach pink— and employed classic-yet-surprising elements like rattan valances and cloud-like moulding to craft whimsical rooms that are sure to make guests feel at home—and compel them to return.
McMakin partnered with Schumacher for the wallcoverings, customizing one of their striped wallpapers into a tented ceiling for a sky blue room and shrinking their famous Feather Bloom pattern to perfectly fit the dimensions of a green suite. The custom furniture was made in collaboration with Society Social and will be available for purchase in 2023 (you can also purchase the hotel’s luxe Matouk linens), and of course, de Gournay—not to be left out—created custom scenes from Palm Beach to greet guests on each elevator landing.
McMakin and Wetenhall also tweaked the lobby with a new de Gournay tableau showing “monkeys behaving badly” on the way into the hotel’s restaurant, Swifty’s. The pool, meanwhile, received a fresh set of whimsical outdoor furniture from Brown Jordan for a scene straight out of a Slim Aarons photo. We couldn’t think of a better—or more luxurious—place to begin checking off our 2023 travel bucket list.
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