Art Hotels

The original property in the 21c group occupies a run of nineteenth-century warehouses on West Main Street, and the museum came first in the thinking. Contemporary exhibitions run through the ground floor and the corridors at all hours, free to walk in off the street, which means the hotel lobby doubles as public gallery space and behaves like one — people wander through who are not staying. Rooms upstairs are calm by comparison, brick and plaster and good light, deliberately restrained so the work downstairs does the talking. There is a restaurant, a bar that stays busy with locals, and the sort of front desk that is used to explaining an installation before it explains the lift.

A grand hotel near the Arc de Triomphe that was rebuilt in the late 2000s with Philippe Starck directing the interiors, and with an unusual amount of institutional machinery attached to the art side: a gallery on site, an art bookshop, and a concierge whose brief is exhibitions rather than restaurants. What makes it interesting is that none of this replaces the hotel. It still runs as a full luxury property — spa, pool, two restaurants, a long-established bar — and the art programme sits alongside that rather than standing in for it. The guest rooms are theatrical without being difficult to sleep in.

A Renaissance villa in the hills outside Verona, restored and then filled with a private contemporary collection that argues, quite openly, with the frescoed rooms it hangs in. The effect is not subtle and is not meant to be. Guests eat in vaulted rooms, sleep under original ceilings, and pass work by living artists on the way to breakfast. Because it is a country property rather than a city one, the pace is slower: gardens, a pool, a kitchen that leans regional, and a small enough room count that the collection never feels crowded.

A hillside hotel above Zurich, part nineteenth-century curhaus and part Norman Foster extension, holding a collection that runs to well over a hundred works distributed through public rooms, corridors and guest floors. Sculpture sits outside on the lawns with the city in the distance. The building's split personality is the point — you cross from panelled historic rooms into glass and pale stone within a few paces — and the collection is hung to make that crossing legible rather than to smooth it over. The spa and the restaurants are the other reason people come, and the hotel does not pretend otherwise.