Little Palm Island Makes Florida Feel Like a Rumor

There is no street number, no entrance visible from the road, and—depending on how you arrive—no sense that you are still in the continental United States. Little Palm Island, four acres off the Lower Florida Keys, is accessible only by boat or seaplane, and it is the only private island resort in the United States.

Perched beside a nondescript lot off the Overseas Highway, guests board a wooden motor yacht—the Truman, named after the former president who used the island as a fishing retreat in the 1940s. The ride takes roughly twenty minutes, past mangroves and flats so shallow the water turns pale green. By the time you reach the dock, Florida feels like a foreign concept.

The resort’s history reads like Americana mystique. Its first inhabitant, Charles Newton Munson, planted the Jamaican palms and built a house and cistern here in the 1920s. During Prohibition it was a refuge for rum-runners. Other notable visitors over the years included John Foster Dulles and Admiral Bull Halsey. Then, in 1962, Warner Brothers arrived: the island served as the filming location for PT-109, the biographical war film starring Cliff Robertson as John F. Kennedy. Before the crew arrived, the island had no electricity, running water, or telephones—until Joseph Kennedy requested that power be run to ease his son’s visit during filming.

The island hideaway became a resort in the 1980s and was largely rebuilt after Hurricane Irma devastated it in 2017. Its current incarnation—designed by Rossi Architecture and AvroKO Design—threads British West Indies references through a more contemporary sensibility. The result feels as if someone had spent decades deciding exactly what to keep from its past lives.

The thirty suites are distributed across thatched-roof bungalows arranged along crushed-seashell paths, with ample room between them, each set flush among the local flora enough to be genuinely reclusive if you want to be. The overall feel leans low-tech: indoor and outdoor showers, copper soaking tubs, no televisions, and phones banned in public areas. The founding developer’s motto, “Do nothing, time is too important to waste,” defines the resort’s ethos to this day.

In the common areas, the design reads like a dazzling version of Old Florida. Subtle, well-oiled wood finishes are juxtaposed with crystal chandeliers over poolside cabanas, all under a dense canopy of palms. An ornate shell-encrusted mirror sits above the Great House fireplace, with life-size portraits of Harry and Bess Truman nearby. The material palette throughout runs to teak, travertine, copper, and rattan.

At dinner, guest tables extend onto a sandbar that juts into the Straits of Florida, pencil fish visible in the shallows. And the dreamiest part of a stay here: every night at dusk, the local Key deer swim ashore to mosey around the grounds like hotel pets (and maybe snack on leftover cocktail garnish from the tiki bar).