MARLIN HOTEL ARCHITECTURE: L. MURRAY DIXON, ISLAND RECORDS, AND THE REBIRTH OF SOUTH BEACH

The Marlin Hotel at 1200 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, is a three-storey Streamline Moderne hotel designed by L. Murray Dixon in 1939 — one of the most prolific architects of the South Beach Art Deco District and, together with Henry Hohauser, co-responsible for approximately 70 percent of all buildings in the historic district. The Marlin's Dixon-designed façade — curvilinear, confident, with the strong horizontal emphasis and projecting window eyebrows characteristic of Tropical Deco — has stood on Collins Avenue for more than eighty years.

But the Marlin's most extraordinary chapter belongs not to 1939 but to the early 1990s, when Chris Blackwell — founder of Island Records, the label that signed Bob Marley, U2, and Cat Stevens — bought the building, installed a recording studio in the ground floor, and turned it into the unofficial headquarters of South Beach's cultural transformation. South Beach Studios drew Aerosmith, Jay-Z, U2, Mick Jagger, and Pharrell Williams to Collins Avenue. Barbara Hulanicki — the founder of London's legendary fashion store Biba — designed the interiors: cool ocean hues, Jamaican colour, custom furniture, an atmosphere that felt simultaneously glamorous and unhurried. In the mid-1990s, when South Beach was becoming one of the most fashionable addresses in the world, the Marlin was where much of it happened.

The building is part of the Miami Beach Art Deco Historic District — the world's largest concentration of Art Deco architecture, and America's first urban 20th-century National Historic District. It operates today as a 33-room boutique hotel, restored and expanded.

  • Written by Gavin Paisley, director & model-maker at Chisel & Mouse based in East Sussex, England.
  • Last updated: 7th April 2026.

Photograph by P. Hughes, licensed under the CC BY 4.0 International licence via Wikimedia Commons.

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What is the Marlin Hotel?

The Marlin Hotel is a boutique Art Deco hotel on Collins Avenue in South Beach, Miami Beach, Florida, built in 1939 and continuously operating in various forms — as apartments, condominiums, offices, and hotel — ever since. It sits in the heart of the Art Deco District, one block from Ocean Drive and two blocks from the beach, on a stretch of Collins Avenue that contains some of Dixon's most concentrated work.

At the time of its construction, Collins Avenue and Ocean Drive were in the middle of the building boom that had transformed South Beach through the 1930s. The district's hotels were modest in scale — designed for middle-class New York tourists seeking winter sunshine — but architecturally inventive, applying the language of international modernism to a subtropical setting with results that were entirely their own. Dixon was at the peak of his productivity in 1939, the year he also designed the Tiffany, the Tudor, and the Senator.

The building was completely renovated in 1991 under Chris Blackwell's ownership, again in 2011, and subsequently expanded from 14 to 33 rooms by the MRK Collection following their purchase of the property in 2015 for $9.5 million.

Facts panel

Three-storey Streamline Moderne hotel at 1200 Collins Avenue, South Beach, Miami Beach, Florida. Designed 1938–39, opened 1939.

  • Architect: Lawrence Murray Dixon (L. Murray Dixon) (1901–1949)
  • Opened: 1939
  • Address: 1200 Collins Avenue, South Beach, Miami Beach, Florida 33139
  • Architectural style: Streamline Moderne / Tropical Deco
  • Floors: Three storeys
  • Rooms: 33 (originally smaller; expanded to 33 by MRK Collection after 2015)
  • Key architectural features: Curvilinear façade; horizontal banding; projecting window eyebrows; stepped parapet; vertical fin element; smooth rendered concrete
  • Part of: Miami Beach Art Deco Historic District (National Register of Historic Places, listed 14 May 1979)
  • Acquired by Chris Blackwell: 1988 (Island Records / Island Outpost)
  • Opened as hotel: November 1991 (after Blackwell's renovation)
  • South Beach Studios: Recording studio installed in ground floor by Blackwell; artists including Aerosmith, Jay-Z, U2, Mick Jagger, Pharrell Williams
  • Interior designer (1991): Barbara Hulanicki (founder of Biba)
  • Sold by Blackwell: c. 2004 (after selling Miami hotel portfolio)
  • Purchased by MRK Collection: April 2015, for $9.5 million
  • Current use: 33-room boutique hotel; Osteria Del Teatro restaurant (ground floor)

Architect: L. Murray Dixon

Lawrence Murray Dixon (16 February 1901 – 8 October 1949) was born in Live Oak, Florida — a native Floridian, unusually, in a city largely built by architects who arrived from elsewhere. He studied briefly at the Georgia School of Technology before moving to New York, where he worked from 1923 to 1929 for Schultze and Weaver — the firm that designed the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. When he moved to Miami Beach in 1929, he brought with him the discipline of a major New York commercial practice and the ambition to apply it to a city that was in the middle of creating itself from scratch.

Dixon established his own practice and became, by the late 1930s, the most prolific architect in Miami Beach — designing approximately 42 hotels in the Art Deco District alone, along with residences, apartments, and commercial buildings. Together with Henry Hohauser, he was responsible for approximately 70 percent of all buildings in the historic district. The PBS documentary American Experience named Dixon and Hohauser "the principal architects of Deco South Beach," with a shared design vocabulary of "streamlined curves, jutting towers, window 'eyebrows,' and neon."

Dixon's work is distinctively his own within that shared vocabulary. Where Hohauser tended towards symmetry and maritime motifs, Dixon's signature quality was curvilinear design — the fluid, rounded forms of Streamline Moderne applied with particular assurance. His buildings wrap around corners, round their parapets, and give their façades a quality of continuous movement that is different from Hohauser's more composed symmetry. His archive — one of the most complete of any South Beach architect — is now held at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach.

His most celebrated surviving buildings include the Tides Hotel (1936), the Raleigh Hotel (1940), the Ritz Plaza (1940), and the Marlin (1939). He died in New York City on 8 October 1949, aged 48, at the peak of his career and before the preservation movement that would eventually recognise his achievement.

Photograph by Gavin Paisley.

Architectural character: the Collins Avenue façade

The Marlin's Collins Avenue façade exemplifies Dixon's mature Streamline Moderne — a composition that draws its energy from the interplay of horizontal and vertical, curved and flat, solid and transparent.

The building is three storeys — taller than the Century Hotel's two, but still intimate by the standards of later Collins Avenue development. The façade is rendered in smooth concrete, the surface divided into horizontal bands that run across the full width at each floor level, creating a strong layered reading that emphasises the building's width and solidity. Against this horizontal emphasis, a vertical fin element projects above the parapet at the centre of the composition, providing the upward accent that gives the building its characteristic silhouette.

Window eyebrows — the horizontal concrete shelves projecting above each window opening that are characteristic of Tropical Deco — shade the glazing from the Florida sun and create a strong shadow pattern across the façade. These are not merely decorative: in the subtropical climate of South Beach, where direct sunlight would otherwise make the rooms uncomfortably hot, they serve a genuine environmental function, cooling the interior while giving the façade its distinctive layered texture.

The corners are rounded — Dixon's curvilinear instinct expressed in the building's most visible transitions. Where a sharp corner would create a definite edge and terminus, the rounded corner wraps the eye around the building and suggests a continuous surface rather than two distinct faces meeting at a joint.

The overall effect is of a building that is simultaneously solid and in motion — the Streamline Moderne aesthetic at its most characteristic, evoking the aerodynamic forms of trains, ships, and aircraft that had become the visual shorthand of modernity in the 1930s.

The Island Records chapter: South Beach Studios

The Marlin's architectural story is inseparable from its cultural one, and its cultural story in the 1990s is one of the more remarkable in the history of any hotel in any city.

Chris Blackwell — born in London, raised in Jamaica, founder in 1959 of Island Records — had sold his label to PolyGram in 1989 for approximately $300 million. He was one of the most influential figures in the history of recorded music: the man who had signed Bob Marley and the Wailers, U2, Cat Stevens, Roxy Music, Grace Jones, and dozens of others; who had introduced reggae to the world; who had understood before almost anyone else that albums were art objects, not just collections of singles. After selling Island, he turned his attention to hotels.

The Marlin was his first. He acquired it in 1988, before the sale of Island Records, and oversaw its renovation and opening as a hotel in November 1991. He installed a recording studio — South Beach Studios — in the ground floor, making it available to Island Records artists and quickly to anyone else who wanted to record in Miami. The studio became a gravitational centre for the music industry at exactly the moment South Beach itself was becoming the most fashionable address in America.

Barbara Hulanicki, who had founded Biba — the defining London fashion store of the 1960s and 70s — and had become a Miami-based interior designer, worked with Blackwell to design the interiors. She created a palette of cool ocean hues combined with the vibrant colours of Jamaica, custom-made furniture, and loft-like suites that felt simultaneously luxurious and relaxed. The atmosphere she created was perfectly calibrated for the kind of guests the building was about to attract.

Artists who recorded or stayed at the Marlin through the 1990s included Aerosmith, U2, Mick Jagger, Jay-Z, Pharrell Williams, and Mariah Carey — a roster that reads like a roll call of the decade's popular music. The Elite Modeling Agency was also housed in the building at one point, adding to the particular social texture of the address. The hotel became what one description called "a tropical retreat for some of the world's most renowned recording artists and performers" — and in doing so it helped define what South Beach was becoming: not merely a preserved architectural district but a living cultural destination.

Blackwell eventually sold his Miami hotel portfolio around 2004, concentrating his attention on Jamaica and the Bahamas. The Marlin passed through several subsequent ownerships before the MRK Collection's renovation and expansion. The platinum albums that once lined the hallways were incorporated into the hotel's identity: the renovated lobby features a collection of album covers configured to create an image of Jimi Hendrix, and the connection to the music industry remains a visible part of the building's story.

Image by Colourpicture Publishers, inc, in the public domain as per Wikimedia Commons.

The Marlin in the context of the Art Deco District

The Marlin sits within one of the most remarkable preserved architectural environments in the world. The Miami Beach Art Deco Historic District covers approximately one square mile of South Beach and contains more than 800 preserved buildings from the 1930s and 1940s — the world's largest concentration of Art Deco architecture, designated as America's first urban 20th-century National Historic District on 14 May 1979.

The district's survival was the achievement of Barbara Baer Capitman, who co-founded the Miami Design Preservation League in 1976 and spent the rest of her life fighting, often literally, to preserve the buildings. She catalogued more than 800 structures, secured the National Register listing over fierce commercial opposition, and stood in front of bulldozers to protect what she described as a complete architectural environment — "a rare intact example of a specific moment in American design and culture."

The Marlin's Collins Avenue location places it at the heart of this ensemble, one block from Ocean Drive's more celebrated streetscape but architecturally representative of what Dixon built throughout the district: practical, inventive, curvilinear, and completely suited to the subtropical setting.

For other Chisel & Mouse models in the same district, see our guides to the Century Hotel and the Plymouth Hotel.

The model-maker's lens

We modelled the Collins Avenue façade because it captures Dixon's Streamline Moderne at its most characteristic — the horizontal banding, the rounded corners, the projecting eyebrows, and the vertical fin that gives the composition its focal point.

  • Focus — the three-storey composition as a whole: the horizontal banding at each floor level creating a strong layered reading; the vertical fin element rising above the parapet; the interplay of solid rendered surface and glazed openings
  • Detail — the window eyebrows are the building's most distinctive repeated element, creating a strong shadow pattern across the façade at any angle of light; the rounded corners wrap the eye from the front face to the side
  • How it reads at small scale — well, because the architecture is about the rhythm of horizontal bands and the contrast between solid surface and glazed openings — both of which read clearly at any reduction; the vertical fin gives the model an immediately legible focal point
  • How to display — best viewed from slightly off-axis, where the depth of the window eyebrows and the wrap of the rounded corners are most apparent; straight on shows the composition's symmetry and the relationship between the horizontal banding and the vertical fin most clearly

There is something fitting about making a model of a building that itself stood at the centre of a moment of cultural reinvention. Dixon designed the Marlin as a piece of the new South Beach of 1939; Blackwell made it the stage for the new South Beach of the 1990s. The building was equal to both.

Frequently asked questions about the Marlin Hotel, Miami Beach

Who designed the Marlin Hotel?

L. Murray Dixon (Lawrence Murray Dixon, 1901–1949), the most prolific architect of the South Beach Art Deco District, who designed approximately 42 hotels within the historic district. His work is known for its curvilinear design.

When was the Marlin Hotel built?

The Marlin Hotel was designed in 1938–39 and opened in 1939, during the peak of the South Beach building boom.

What was South Beach Studios?

A recording studio installed in the ground floor of the Marlin Hotel by Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records, following his acquisition of the building in 1988. It attracted a wide range of major artists including Aerosmith, U2, Jay-Z, Mick Jagger, and Pharrell Williams throughout the 1990s.

Who was Chris Blackwell?

The founder of Island Records (1959), the label that signed Bob Marley, U2, Cat Stevens, Roxy Music, and many others. After selling Island Records to PolyGram in 1989, he turned to hospitality, with the Marlin as his first hotel project, opened in 1991.

Who was Barbara Hulanicki?

The founder of Biba, the defining London fashion store of the 1960s and 1970s, who reinvented herself as a Miami-based interior designer. She designed the Marlin's interiors for Chris Blackwell in 1991, creating a palette of ocean hues and Jamaican colour that defined the hotel's atmosphere.

What is the Art Deco Historic District?

A one-square-mile area of South Beach containing over 800 preserved buildings from the 1930s and 1940s, listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 14 May 1979 — the first urban 20th-century historic district in America to receive the designation.

What other buildings did Dixon design?

His most celebrated surviving buildings include the Tides Hotel (1936), the Raleigh Hotel (1940), the Ritz Plaza (1940), and the Tiffany, Tudor, and Senator hotels (all 1939). Together with Henry Hohauser, he designed approximately 70 percent of all buildings in the Miami Beach Art Deco Historic District.

Is the Marlin Hotel still operating?

Yes. It operates as a 33-room boutique hotel at 1200 Collins Avenue, South Beach, following renovation and expansion by the MRK Collection after their 2015 acquisition. The ground-floor restaurant is Osteria Del Teatro, specialising in Northern Italian cuisine.

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