Category 1 of 4 · 4 hotels

Art Hotels

Art hotels earn the label in different ways. One hires a curator and changes the walls; one inherits frescoes and argues with them; one is named for a painter and hangs his circle in the corridors; one hands twelve artists a floor each. What they share is that the work is on the route you already walk — lobby, lift, corridor, room — rather than filed into a gallery wing you may never enter. The four below are described as buildings first: where they stand, how they are run, and what the art actually does to a stay.

The four entries

Art Hotel France

Le Royal Monceau – Raffles Paris

Paris, France

A grand hotel just off the Arc de Triomphe that decided, during its Philippe Starck reworking, to behave like a collector rather than a landmark. Guitars lean against furniture in the suites. A bookshop sells art titles in the lobby. There is an art concierge whose whole job is knowing which gallery opened what this week.

The building holds a private cinema and a gallery space that changes hands between artists, so the public rooms rarely look the same two seasons running. Guests who never set foot in either still pass through them, which is rather the point — the art is laid across the route to the lift, not filed away in a wing.

It is, underneath the programme, a large classic Parisian hotel with a pool, a spa and a great deal of marble. The art is the character; the hotel is the structure holding it up.

In brief

Gallery on site
Art concierge
Private cinema
Paris 8th

Art Hotel Italy

Byblos Art Hotel Villa Amistà

Corrubbio di Negarine, Italy

A sixteenth-century villa in the Valpolicella hills, frescoed where the centuries left frescoes and hung with contemporary work everywhere else. The collision is deliberate and not softened: a painted ceiling above, something sharp and modern at eye level below.

Rooms carry the same argument indoors. Period proportions, high shuttered windows, and furniture and pieces chosen to sit awkwardly — productively awkwardly — against them. The gardens are formal; the sculpture in them is not.

Vineyards run to the edge of the property, and the hotel keeps the pace of the countryside around it. Verona is a short drive, which means guests tend to treat the villa as the quiet half of the trip.

In brief

Frescoed villa
Contemporary collection
Sculpture garden
Valpolicella

Art Hotel Australia

The Olsen

Melbourne, Australia

Named for John Olsen, and built on the straightforward premise that a hotel can be hung like a gallery without pretending to be one. Work by the painter and his circle runs through the corridors and into the rooms, so the art is encountered on the way to bed rather than sought out.

It sits on Chapel Street in South Yarra, which gives the building a busy, shop-lined street on one side and a calm residential grid on the other. Many rooms have curved glass balconies — a small architectural quirk that makes the facade legible from blocks away.

A rooftop pool with a glass floor sits above the lobby. The hotel is part of a small Australian group that does this in several cities, each hotel attached to one artist.

In brief

Artist-named
Work in every room
Glass-floor pool
South Yarra

Art Hotel Austria

Kunsthotel Fuchspalast

St. Veit an der Glan, Austria

A hotel organised around the zodiac, of all things: twelve artists were each given a sign and a set of rooms, and told to work. The result is a building where moving one floor up changes the entire visual register — palette, motif, mood.

Ernst Fuchs, the Viennese fantastic realist, shaped the overall scheme, and the lobby and stair carry his hand most visibly. It is maximal, unembarrassed and occasionally a great deal to take in first thing in the morning.

The town around it is small and walled and Carinthian, and the hotel serves it as an ordinary town hotel does — conferences, dinners, people passing through. The paintwork simply happens to be an attraction in its own right.

In brief

Twelve artists
Zodiac rooms
Ernst Fuchs scheme
Carinthia