If you're shopping Bal Harbour, you don't have to sleep in the noise to do it. Bal Harbour Shops is at 9700 Collins Avenue, roughly twenty blocks north of our door at 7418 Harding Avenue, which is a few minutes by car and a long, flat walk if the morning is cool enough for it. We're a 29-room house in North Beach: two floors, a courtyard pool ringed in teak decking and native palms, and a garden that hides us from the street. Felix designed each room himself, and the art on the walls was commissioned from Mark Cherry. Quiet luxury you feel rather than see.
What that means in practice is that you can spend an afternoon between the storefronts at 9700 Collins and be back in the water by five, with nobody playing music at you. The beach is a short walk from our gate, and we keep sunbeds and umbrellas waiting on the quieter sand. Someone of the house is awake whenever you are, so a late flight or an early shopping start is not a problem.
North Beach still has its soul. It is residential in a way the south end of the island stopped being decades ago: low buildings, Cuban and Argentine kitchens, old Italian family restaurants, people walking dogs at seven in the morning. Harding Avenue runs us straight north into Surfside and then into Bal Harbour, so the three neighbourhoods read as one long street with different moods.
Below are the four places we actually send guests to in this direction. We've left out anything we can't vouch for. If you want more than this, ask at the desk and we'll point you at the galleries and the smaller cafés on 71st Street; a list on a page is never as good as a recommendation made to your face.
A note on timing. Bal Harbour Shops is an open-air, two-level centre, and the middle of a Miami afternoon in summer is the worst of it. Go in the morning, or go after four. The same is true of the beach, which is the other reason the courtyard is where the day really begins here.