An art-deco hotel on Highway 59

1. The name

   South Beach. The resort's address is 1 Ocean Dr. Its restaurant is Mango's, its lounge the Blue Dolphin, its buffet The Palms, its gift shop the Coral Reef, and a bar on the casino floor is the Tidal Wave. Nothing about the naming is subtle.

2. The style

   The resort says the entire property is fashioned in an art-deco design with a tropical atmosphere. Wikipedia repeats the same description, with a tropical pool and cascading waterfall.

3. The outside

   Travel Manitoba's writer, in March 2024, described the hard-edged, embellished design of the six-storey hotel as making visitors feel they are cruising along Ocean Drive, the famous strip in Miami's South Beach.

4. The lobby

   Inside, the same writer found a cheerful orange and turquoise colour scheme, two dolphin mascots in a corner, and art-deco stars and graphics on the floor leading the way.

5. The pool

   Large columns in sparkly mosaic-like tile, a Mediterranean-bath feeling, west-facing picture windows and a rain-shower feature with colour-changing lights.

6. Mango's

   Ferns and palm trees, a glowing blue water wall and a flashing image wall, "like you're dining along the coast".

Why build Miami in Manitoba?

I have no statement from the resort explaining the choice, so I will not invent one. What I can say is what the theme does for a winter visitor: it turns a highway hotel into a few hours of somewhere warm. Travel Manitoba's whole article is framed that way, as a tropical holiday without leaving the province. The resort, for its part, calls itself a Manitoba Star Attraction destination on its home page.

What the theme does in summer

In July the joke works the other way. You leave a fake beach in the morning for a real one, three kilometres of white sand on Lake Winnipeg, and come back to the fake one at night for the hot tub. I find that cheerful rather than odd.

What I could not see

No architect is named on the resort's pages, and I found no published plans that I could use to say more about the building itself. The pictures on this site are illustrations drawn for it, not photographs of the resort, and they are labelled that way.