A European Hotel Group That Rarely Says Yes Just Made Its First American Address — and Skipped New York

A group that owns nine hotels in a hundred and twenty years does not choose an eleventh lightly. It chose Palm Beach.

Oetker Collection opened The Vineta Hotel on March 2, 2026, at 363 Cocoanut Row — its first property in the United States, after a century built almost entirely around the French and Italian Rivieras: Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, Eden Rock in St Barths, Brenners Park in Baden-Baden, Château Saint-Martin above Nice. The group is majority-owned by the Oetker family and moves at the pace that implies; the Vineta is only its eleventh hotel since Château Saint-Martin joined the collection in the 1950s. That it opened in Palm Beach, and not New York, is the part worth sitting with.

The building has earned the address change back. It opened in 1926 as the Lido-Venice, was renamed The Vineta two years later, and kept that name for half a century before becoming the Palm Court and then, from around 1989, the Chesterfield — a name that stuck through decades as one of the island's better-known but never grandest hotels. Reuben Brothers bought the property in 2022, restored the Vineta name, and spent close to three years rebuilding it with Oetker Collection as operator: the room count cut from 57 to 41, interiors by Tino Zervudachi, a restaurant called Coco's serving dishes built around Palm Beach produce alongside a few favorites carried over from Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc's own kitchens, an American bar, and a courtyard at the center of it. The three-story Mediterranean Revival building has sat on the National Register of Historic Places since 1986; the renovation worked inside that constraint rather than around it.

The choice of city is not a compromise entry into the American market — it is closer to a recognition. Palm Beach in February looks, in clientele if not in climate, like Antibes in August: the same families who close out August at the Cap and St Barths at New Year already winter two blocks from where the Vineta now stands, on a street where Worth Avenue does the work Rue d'Antibes does at Eden-Roc. Oetker did not need to teach a market who it was. It needed a building good enough to deserve the name back.

Image: Vineta Hotel (as The Chesterfield), Ebyabe / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 — pre-renovation photograph of the same historic building at 363 Cocoanut Row; no image of the 2026 Oetker Collection renovation with clear usage rights was found.

— Camille