Art Hotels

Hotels in this section treat the collection as part of the building rather than as decoration hung after the fact. Some were assembled by owners who bought steadily over decades; others commissioned work for particular rooms and corridors. What follows is a short account of each property and the way art sits inside it.

The Dolder Grand

Zurich, Switzerland

A hillside property above Zurich that began as a curhaus in 1899 and reopened in 2008 after a long reconstruction, with a curved new wing set against the original turreted building. The art is the unusual part: works are placed throughout the public rooms, corridors and guest floors rather than gathered into a gallery, so guests pass sculpture and painting on the way to breakfast. The spa occupies a large part of the lower levels, cut into the slope, and the grounds run straight onto the surrounding forest paths.

Opened 1899
Hillside setting
Art throughout the building

Le Royal Monceau – Raffles Paris

Paris, France

Near the Arc de Triomphe, this hotel reopened in 2010 under a Philippe Starck interior that deliberately kept the building's slightly theatrical character. It maintains an art concierge, a bookshop weighted towards art titles, and a small cinema — an unusual amount of programming for a hotel of its size. Rooms are generously proportioned by central Paris standards, and the courtyard garden gives the ground floor an outdoor room that most of its neighbours lack.

Reopened 2010
Art bookshop
Courtyard garden

21c Museum Hotel Louisville

Louisville, United States

The first of the 21c properties, occupying a row of nineteenth-century warehouses on West Main Street. Roughly nine thousand square feet of contemporary exhibition space runs through the ground floor and basement, open around the clock and free to enter, so the museum functions as a public building with a hotel above it. Exhibitions rotate, which means the look of the place changes several times a year; the guest rooms, by contrast, stay deliberately plain.

Converted warehouses
Free public galleries
Rotating exhibitions

Hotel Art by the Spanish Steps

Rome, Italy

Housed on Via Margutta, a street long associated with artists' studios, in a building that was once a college and chapel. The vaulted former chapel now serves as the lobby, with reception set into four coloured pods beneath the arches — a modern insertion left frankly visible against the old fabric. It is a small hotel, and its position a few minutes from the Spanish Steps puts a dense concentration of galleries within an easy walk.

Former chapel lobby
Via Margutta address
Small property