Bike - Setai Miami Beach
And so a gal has to continue round the world, by a variety of means. In Miami Beach, The Setai has marvellously retro bikes.
Borrow one to cycle down Collins from 20th Street, where the Setai is, to 12th Street to The Webster.
The Webster is, well, still the shell of a hotel but inside it is luxury retail. You still enter the 1939 Art Deco building to find a lobby, now a chic café.
Shoes at The Webster - Miami Beach
The emporium is owned and run by long-time Gucci specialist Frederic Dechnik; Laura Heriard Dubreuil, ex Balenciaga; and high-profile ideas genius, Milan Vukmirovic, formerly Creative Director at Gucci Group and Jil Sander.
Every room runs into the next, offering exqusitely breathtaking selections of clothes, shoes and the like, everything you must have. Fortunately The Setai’s bikes have baskets so you can carry your loot back up home, and put it away before deciding which of this luxury hotel’s pools is right for the moment.
The three parallel pools are all 90 feet, but one is 75-degrees, one 85-degrees and, the most popular, 95-degrees. I plunged into the coldest.
Cycling for a super-enthusiast
A traveller, a super-fit traveller, gets used to all weathers. Cycling in the snow back home in England gives a delightful crunch, crunch, as one breaks through the snow’s crust.
Cycling in Phuket, Thailand
At Anantara Phuket Resort and Spa – a favourite, also, of super-model Kate Moss and, separately, Kevin Spacey – I had my own bike, with my name on it. How the – empty – bottle of Dom Pérignon got into main billing remains a mystery.
Perhaps we had been watching the sun set on the divine beach, before our Pig & Pinot dinner. There were ducks everywhere on the inland waterways that make this resort, which attracts lots of honeymooners from Germany, Russia and the UK, even more full of life.
Ann Ladd, Artist-in-Residence
Anantara’s sometime, which means sometimes there, sometimes not, artist-in-residence, Ann Ladd, loves those ducks. She paints on the terrace that you pass to go to breakfast, and gives one-to-one lessons in a treehouse.
She had me draw the outline of a still life without looking at the paper. The result was either ‘consignment to a home for the disturbed’ or ‘sell at Sotheby’s immediately, this is genius’.
A yellow statement, courtesy Lamborghini
Time to return to the real world, gal. How about Italy, next? Having raved about red Ferraris, manufactured in Maranello, one is not, shall we say, put off by the occasional ride in a yellow Lamborghini, from Sant’Agata Bolognese (there is a Lamborghini Museum there, must put in on the list – do more travelling, girl).
