Casa Cañita

Chef Michelle Bernstein and her sister, designer Nicolette Bernstein, opened their first hotel on 24 April 2026 inside a historic Art Deco building at 1200 Ocean Drive. The 24-room Casa Cañita reimagines Miami Beach through the lens of Cuba's golden age, anchored by La Cañita restaurant and nightly live music.

The place

1200 Ocean Drive, at 12th Street — inside Miami Beach's Art Deco Historic District, across the street from the sand and Lummus Park, on the stretch of Ocean Drive that made South Beach famous and, in recent decades, occasionally infamous for its tourist-trap reputation. Casa Cañita's arrival is part of a broader push to reclaim that stretch for a design-literate, slower-paced crowd.

The concept

Casa Cañita occupies an Art Deco building that has stood on Ocean Drive for close to a century, reworked from the inside out by chef Michelle Bernstein, her sister — designer Nicolette Bernstein — and partners Orestes Pajon, Davide Borgia and David Martinez. The 24 rooms, ranging from queen accommodations to a two-bedroom, two-bathroom oceanfront suite, are conceived less as hotel rooms than as a single, extended apartment: dark wainscoting, botanical wallpaper, velvet headboards on coral-lacquered frames, handmade Nicaraguan chairs and flea-market artwork, no two rooms identical. Nicolette Bernstein has summarized the brief as 'Cuba, if…' — an imagined pre-revolution Havana refracted through a Miami lens rather than a literal restoration, conjured through mid-century silhouettes, tropical prints and a deliberately maximalist hand rather than pastiche. All rooms are pet-friendly, several open onto private balconies, and in-room lighting is designed to be reset guest by guest rather than fixed at a single hotel-standard setting.

Dining & wellness

Dining runs through La Cañita, the ground-floor restaurant and bar that doubles as the hotel's public face on Ocean Drive: Caribbean and Latin American cooking built around croquetas, ropa vieja, conch fritters and jerk-spiced wings, with a bar list centered on rum and sugarcane spirits and a rotating roster of mojito variations. Live music — percussion, guitar, maracas, flute — plays nightly, spilling from the dining room onto the sidewalk. There is no pool or spa; instead, room keys unlock beach access directly across the street, with two chairs and an umbrella included, and the hotel arranges cigar-rolling sessions, Cuban-style cocktail classes and dance lessons for guests who want programming beyond the beach chair.