Santa Rosa Beach
Florida


The Experience

Flanked by the sugarcane sands of the Gulf of Mexico on one side and by brackish dune lakes on the other, the WaterColor Inn doesn’t feel like a hotel: It feels like someone’s (huge) beach house. David Rockwell designed this four-story inn, and his touches show through the exposed rafter rails, trellises and lime-green shutters. But it’s the surrounding land that makes this place special: amid environmentally protected dunes along what is annually lauded as the country’s best beach. And of course, you’re just steps from Seaside, the idyllic pastel village immortalized in Jim Carrey’s The Truman Show.

The Rooms

Done up cabana-style with hand-tufted rugs and pastel-colored furnishings that recall an enviable Coastal Living magazine spread, rooms are large and uncluttered, though it hardly matters when you can walk outside to a covered porch, lounge in an Adirondack chair and gaze out over either ocean or dunes (opt for those within eyeshot of the Gulf for unforgettable sunsets). Still, the rooms to snag are the trio of outsized rotunda suites, on each level of the hotel’s circular central tower, which overlook the smallest of the hotel’s three pools and offer wide ocean panoramas.

The Service

Despite the Florida ZIP code, guests will feel authentic Southern charm -- notable in a region long synonymous with spring-breakers and strip malls. Everyone from drivers of the hotel’s white SUVs, who retrieve guests from the nearby airport and shuttle them around, to the sommelier at the in-house restaurant couldn’t be any more welcoming.

The Highlights

Private access to the Gulf’s pristine waters and the talcumlike sands on which they lap are unsurprisingly the hotel’s main raison d'être. To explore, you can rent kayaks, canoes and bicycles. Or take advantage of the inn’s relationship with Camp Creek Golf Club, 20 minutes away. The exclusive 7,159-yard Tom Fazio–designed course is set on more than 1,000 acres of beautiful wetlands, marshes and sandy hills and is available only to members -- or hotel guests. Then wind down in the spa and finish the day at the Fish Out of Water restaurant, where haute cuisine is paired with an extensive wine list and served in a dining room where draperies, ironwork and handblown glass art complement ocean vistas.

--Farhad Heydari

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