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. 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.