21c Museum Hotel Louisville
Louisville, Kentucky
The building began as a row of nineteenth-century tobacco and bourbon warehouses on Main Street, and the conversion kept the brick, the timber and the long floor plates largely intact. What was added underneath is a contemporary art museum that stays open around the clock and asks nothing of visitors at the door, so the lobby is rarely only a lobby.
Guests reach their rooms by walking past whatever is currently installed. Exhibitions rotate, which means a returning guest is unlikely to meet the same work twice, and the hotel's flock of red penguin figures tends to migrate around the property in the meantime. The restaurant on the ground floor is a serious operation in its own right rather than an amenity tacked on.
The Dolder Grand
Zurich, Switzerland
High on the Adlisberg above Zurich, the Dolder Grand keeps the silhouette of an 1899 resort with turrets and a long approach, and has a pair of modern wings added on either side during a Foster + Partners renovation. The art is not hung as decoration: works appear in corridors, in the lounge, on landings, and are catalogued and discussed like a collection because that is what they are.
It is a full grand-hotel operation — spa across several floors, dining rooms, the kind of view over lake and city that the site was chosen for in the first place. The pleasure of staying here is partly the pleasure of wandering a place that treats its own hallways as gallery space.
Le Royal Monceau – Raffles Paris
Paris, France
A 1928 hotel near the Arc de Triomphe, reopened after a Philippe Starck redesign that leaned hard into the idea of a hotel for people who look at things. There is a bookshop weighted toward art titles, a small cinema, a gallery space that programmes its own exhibitions, and an art concierge whose job is to steer guests through whatever Paris has on that week.
The rooms carry the same conceit without labouring it — guitars, easels and unfinished-looking arrangements turn up where a more conventional hotel would put a desk. Underneath the staging, it runs as a Paris palace hotel, with the spa, pool and service that implies.
Art Series – The Olsen
Melbourne, Australia
Each hotel in the Art Series is built around a single living or late Australian painter, and this one belongs to John Olsen. Reproductions and original works run through the public rooms and the corridors, and the hotel's identity — colour, signage, even the bar menus — is drawn from the same source.
It sits in South Yarra, a short walk from Chapel Street, with a glass-bottomed pool cantilevered over the entrance that is more fun than it needs to be. The result is a mid-sized city hotel that has committed to one artist rather than sampling many.