Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands

Palm Heights

Price per night from$925.17

Price information

If you haven’t entered any dates, the rate shown is provided directly by the hotel and represents the cheapest double room (inclusive of taxes and fees) available in the next 60 days.

Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (USD925.17), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.

Style

Across the frond

Setting

Seventh heaven

On a sugar-white stretch of Seven Mile Beach in Grand Cayman, Palm Heights has all the fronds and retro finds to reach breezy, beach-house heaven. The palm-lined pool leads down to the shore, where sunloungers and sunshine-yellow parasols are set up for days spent staring out to sea, mainlining rum or working out with one of the personal trainers on the sand (or a combination of all three). Some suites have marble bath tubs on the terrace for at-one-with-nature cleansing, and all spy the sparkly Caribbean Sea. Regular wellness retreats are held to offset the cocktail and conch-fritter action – and a super spa is coming later this year.

Smith Extra

Get this when you book through us:

A $70 credit to spend on food and drinks during your stay

Facilities

Photos Palm Heights facilities

Need to know

Rooms

51 suites.

Check–Out

Noon. Earliest check-in, 4pm. Both are flexible, subject to availability.

More details

Rates don’t usually include breakfast (from about US$20 a person).

Also

The hotel’s communal areas are accessible for wheelchair users, and some rooms have been specially adapted.

At the hotel

Beach, gym, library, ping-pong table, board games to borrow, filtered-water station on each floor, free paddleboards, snorkels and kayaks to borrow, and free WiFi throughout. In rooms: Apple TV with Netflix, Costa Brazil bath products, Bose speakers, two minibars (one to detox, the other to retox), tea and coffee kit, beach bags and air-conditioning; game consoles can be placed in your room on request. The Two Bedroom Oceanfront Penthouse Suite has an infrared sauna too.

Our favourite rooms

Each room has at least a glimpse of the sea, but go full frontal with one of the ‘oceanfront’ or ‘beachfront’ categories. If you’re a fan of alfresco ablutions, book a suite with the bath tub out on the terrace and feel at one with nature.

Poolside

There’s a lengthy pool leading down to the sand, lined by palm trees and sunloungers – but the stretch of Seven Mile Beach set up with yellow parasols makes it a tough call. There’s another outdoor pool with a Jacuzzi and terrace.

Spa

The spa (opening soon) will take a holistic approach to health, offering wellness treatments for the mind, body, gut and skin. For now, guests can enjoy in-room treatments such as aromatherapy massages, sculpting facials and even mother and baby treatments. Wellness facilities such as an infrared sauna, steam room, ice room and cold plunge pool are also available.

Packing tips

You’re on one of the Caribbean’s finest stretches of sand – load that suitcase with swimwear, flip-flops and snorkels.

Also

The hotel hosts regular exercise and wellness retreats, along with rooftop yoga, personal training and beach workouts – it’s also home to a fancy freediving centre.

Pet‐friendly

Pets can come too, at no additional cost – just let the hotel know and you'll have a bowl and cookies waiting in your room. See more pet-friendly hotels in Grand Cayman.

Children

All ages are welcome. Extra beds and baby cots can be added to rooms, and there are two-bedroom suites. Babysitting is available with two days’ notice for US$18 an hour, plus taxis and an after-hours surcharge.

Sustainability efforts

The hotel sources most of the fish and vegetables for its restaurant from local fishermen and farms, and uses corn straws instead of plastic ones. In-room bath products are full-size, and you’ll have decanters of filtered still and sparkling water to drink instead of plastic bottles.

Food and Drink

Photos Palm Heights food and drink

Top Table

Ask for a seat closest to the sea and watch the waves crash as you devour conch.

Dress Code

Even the mirrors have palm fronds on them around here – dig out your finest foliage-covered fabric and wear with pride.

Hotel restaurant

Tillie’s menu travels the world, spending a lot of time in the Caribbean, with Jamaican, Cuban and Mexican flavours, but stopping in on Asia, too. The island’s produce is put to good use: expect fish from that morning’s market, Cayman-tomato salads and tostones (fried local plantains), along with empanadas, conch fritters, curries and snapper ceviche. Breakfast dishes include fried eggs with mashed plantain, fried cheese, red onions and salami; coconut milk and cinnamon porridge; and French toast with cane sugar and tahini.

Hotel bar

The oceanfront Coconut Club is a great place to start trying some island rum – or stick to the mocktails, which someone has obviously spent some time naming: the marvellous monikers include Fennel Lime-Aid and Bodega Watermelon Slushie. Jerk-aubergine bowls, burgers and tacos are on hand if you’re hungry. Tillie's also has an outdoor bar.

Last orders

Tillie’s is open all day, until 10pm, with breakfast served between 7am and 11am. The Coconut Club’s hours are 10am to 7pm.

Room service

Most of Tillie's menu can be served in room on request.

Location

Photos Palm Heights location
Address
Palm Heights
747 West Bay Road
Seven Mile Beach
KY1 1110
Cayman Islands

Palm Heights is on the western shores of Grand Cayman, north of George Town and in the middle of Seven Mile Beach.

Planes

George Town’s Owen Roberts International Airport is closest; the drive should take around 15 minutes. Hotel transfers cost US$150 one-way, but local taxis are also available.

Automobiles

It’s under 10 minutes by car to George Town and there’s free valet parking at the hotel – but if you’re planning to hang firmly around Seven Mile Beach, you won’t need wheels.

Worth getting out of bed for

Palm Heights is in the centre of Seven Mile Beach, with its own stretch of sand for guests to stake out. Walk up and down all seven miles, picking your patch for sunset. The hotel is on the east coast of the island, which is still a lot less populated and has plenty of wild areas for dips. Borrow the Xbox or one of the board games or books at the library, or stage a ping-pong tournament at the outdoor table. Borrow the free kayaking, snorkelling and paddleboarding equipment, or head to the on-site dive shop to get kitted out for jet skiing, freediving or scuba diving. The hotel can also arrange helicopter trips to other islands – set off for a day dive on Little Cayman and Cayman Brac. Hop on horseback and trot along the beach – the horses around here are partial to a dip and you’ll be able to swim with them while still in the saddle.

Local restaurants

Alarm-clock snoozers who’ve missed breakfast can find refuge at Lauren’s, where breakfast burritos, shrimp Benedict and any-kind-of omelettes are served all day. Islanders love Calypso Grill mostly for its daily catches, but also for its waterfront seating where you can enjoy specials like ginger tuna and lobster and shrimp in champagne sauce. More super-fresh seafood awaits at Cracked Conch, where the namesake marine mollusc can be eaten in chowder, ceviche and (obviously) cracked – with pickled fennel and curried tartare sauce – forms. Upstairs at Kaibo is set in an old plantation house, with a six-course tasting menu and possibly the biggest rum collection on the island.

Local bars

For cocktails on the sand – and a tacos and ceviches to soak them up with – head to Coccoloba, where happy hour gets even jollier thanks to regular live music.

Reviews

Photos Palm Heights reviews
Hannah Ralph

Anonymous review

Mr Smith and I are in the reception. The glow of five Ingo Maurer Uchiwa wall lights illuminate the desk. The room key is barely in my hands before Bambi, a tall glass of everything in a Jackie O headscarf and zebra print co-ord, is already, of course, the love of my life.

Falling for the people who work at Palm Heights was not like falling for Palm Heights itself. That was something I had done gradually, from afar, the way all good millennials do: via Instagram. Since 2018 the hotel had, led by founder-aesthete Gabriella Khalil and her co-designers, Sarita Posada and Courtney Applebaum, soft-launched a sea of visual references to its feed. Somewhere between the mid-century Le Corbusier and Helmut Newton’s early colour photography, the part of me who so desperately wanted to be someone who could recognise 4,000-pound-a-pop Ingo Maurer Uchiwa wall lights became quietly obsessed with this Caribbean outlier, years before the pandemic would let me anywhere near it.

But now I’m obsessed with Bambi. After I’ve taken, on average, 5,039 photos of my suite, Bambi whisks me straight to Palm Heights’ indoor-outdoor pizza restaurant, Paradise Pizza, for Mambo Italiano night, where we drink orange wine and eat spaghetti swirled straight from the giant parmesan wheel and descend into a perfect karaoke slop-fest.

I while away hours chatting with print designers from New York, DJs from Miami and photographers from London. Around us, large groups of impeccably dressed women line long tables like the Last Supper if the Last Supper had been styled by the Row. Despite my 12-hour flight, it was like jet lag couldn’t quite get a hold of me, so immediately had I been woven into the fabric of Palm Heights.

Our aforementioned friends, it turned out, were not just here for a tan (although huge kudos to anyone visiting Palm Heights exclusively to sunbathe on its private patch of Seven Mile Beach – yours enviously, the piece of uncooked bacon two sun loungers down). This supremely chic rabble were in fact part of the hotel’s artist residence programme – a cultural pillar of Khalil’s vision to create a space that 'nurtures artists, writers and athletes with direct or indirect links or interests in the Caribbean'. And while they may have been actively creating – see furniture designer, Eny Lee Parker, sat barefooted, making lights from stretched plaster cloth, or ballet dancer Patricia Zhou presenting new choreography beneath the moon – they were also recharging, topping up their creative batteries as if they’d suddenly gone solar-powered.

It was at the Coconut Club – Palm Heights’ beachside bar; all yolky yellows and pear-drop pink cushions – that Bambi schooled me in the art of 'stepping up'. As we wolfed fish-o-fillet burgers ('You get this sandwich is a reference to McDonalds, right? Like the Americana of the Fifties? Everything here is a reference to something'), I began to understand that this post-modernist patchwork of a hotel was so dreamy, in fact, that it could operate just like one: an intermediary space to glow-up and play while the rest of the world froze. It was a place to dial up my 'vibrational frequency' (Bambi talk) and leave on a 'higher level' (Bambi talk) than the one I’d arrived on. In my suite, yoga mats willed me to use them while a ‘Wellness Schedule’ spoke of sound healing, guided meditation, and psychic readings.

The next day, I’m curled up in the bed of a suite that isn’t my own. Janine Martins, the hotel’s in-house energy healer, yogi and psychic, is sat at its foot, singing about rivers and brothers, pinging sound waves out of sound baths. I lean into it. My skin tingles. Afterward, Janine asks me if I was hot or cold. Cold, I say. Unlike heat, this meant I was letting energy into my body rather than letting it go. I asked what energy she thought I’d let in: 'the body takes what it needs'. Next up, a massage from a woman with magic hands, who gave me a choice of scents and soundtracks, and finally a steaming mint tea to drink while I sat and skipped through Marks and Monograms of the Modern Movement 1875–1930.

Not that my supple sorceress was to know, but this writer can be no more be healed by a massage than she can by a book. Palm Heights gave me, in this respect, nothing short of a medicinal high. It starts in the suites, all of them ocean-facing and plied with (bespoke – you’ll get asked for your preferences) reading material. One swift side-eye to my camera and suddenly my lounge is switched in with Jean-Daniel Lorieux photography tomes.

There’s a joyfully air-conditioned reading room at the heart of the operation, where guests can kick back with a vintage Vogue on a Charles Rennie Mackintosh or Mario Bellini Bambole (thanks to Khalil’s collector-curator background, every chair you sit on and every light you read by heralds some great and iconic designer). And finally, there’s the small, appointment-only magazine boutique, Library Fetish, home to purchase-able first editions.

On my final morning, I’m sipping iced coffee by the pool. The tiles are squared, white. They scream of Alain Capeillères 70’s modernism. The depth markers are painted on in an Art Deco typeface. I gobble tostones and sushi under the gaze of Grecian busts at Tillies, the hotel’s palm-protected restaurant. I remember the David Ligare paintings I’d seen on Palm Heights’ own Instagram, the photo-realist depictions of Homeric surrealism in Greek temples by the sea. Inside the lounge, a backgammon board could have fallen straight out of one of Slim Aarons’ Palm Springs portraits. Everything here is a reference to something.

Even the new cocktail bar (coming later this year, alongside the launch of an on-site retail concept and the hotel’s fully realised Garden Club spa and athletics space) is a call-back to something special. After all, they’re calling it Bambi's.

Book now

Price per night from $767.27