EAST Miami

The pool

• Four pools across a 5th-floor deck
• Brickell City Centre
• Downtown Miami views
• Day passes

Why it's on the list

The pool deck spreads across the fifth floor of Brickell City Centre — four pools over 20,000 square feet, with downtown Miami stacked up around you rather than below you, and day passes for anyone not staying. Sugar, the bar forty floors above, is the altitude play; this is the swim.

The stay

EAST is the vertical-city one — Hong Kong-based Swire's first U.S. hotel, opened in May 2016 as the crown of its Brickell City Centre development, with 255 rooms and eight suites (plus 89 apartment-style residences) directly above the shopping center. Staying here means downtown Miami as a working city rather than a resort: Quinto's fire-cooked South American menu downstairs, the mall below, and Sugar's fortieth-floor garden bar above. At $$$ it's strong value for the scale — book it for the sprawling fifth-floor deck and the sky-bar nightcap, and accept that the beach is a taxi ride, not a stroll.