Art Hotels

Hotels where the collection is part of the plan of the building, not decoration added afterwards.

Art hotels are easy to claim and harder to mean. The four here mean it in different ways: one keeps a free public museum on its ground floor, one sets contemporary work against sixteenth-century frescoes, one is named for a painter, and one has assembled a collection substantial enough to be catalogued.

What they share is that the art changes how the building is used — where you walk, what you stop in front of, how the rooms are lit — rather than simply hanging where a print would otherwise hang.

21c Museum Hotel Louisville

Louisville, Kentucky, United States

A row of nineteenth-century tobacco and bourbon warehouses on West Main Street was joined together to make this hotel, and the joining is still legible: cast-iron storefronts outside, heavy timber and brick within.

What distinguishes it is that the ground floor is a contemporary art museum, open to the public without charge, with rotating exhibitions rather than a fixed hang. Guests pass through the galleries on the way to the lift, which means the art is encountered casually, at odd hours, rather than visited.

Rooms are calm by comparison — pale walls, deep windows, restrained furnishing — the building's way of letting the work downstairs do the talking.

Byblos Art Hotel Villa Amistà

Corrubbio di Negarine, Veneto, Italy

A sixteenth-century villa in the hills above Verona, remodelled in the eighteenth century and then, more recently, fitted out as a hotel that sets contemporary art and design against frescoed rooms and stone floors.

The effect is deliberately unresolved. A modern piece stands in a hall whose ceiling was painted four centuries earlier, and neither is asked to defer to the other.

Outside there are formal gardens, a park, and the Valpolicella vineyards beyond — the older half of the argument, and the quieter one.

The Olsen

South Yarra, Melbourne, Australia

Named for the Australian painter John Olsen, whose work hangs throughout, this hotel sits on Chapel Street among the galleries and design shops of South Yarra.

Much of the accommodation takes the form of studios and suites with kitchens, which gives the place a longer, more residential rhythm than a conventional city hotel. Curved glass balconies run down the facade.

Art here is a house theme rather than a museum programme: reproductions, originals and commissioned pieces distributed through corridors, rooms and public spaces.

The Dolder Grand

Zurich, Switzerland

Opened in 1899 as a curhaus on the Adlisberg above Zurich, the Dolder Grand keeps its turreted original wing and adds two curved contemporary ones, a pairing carried out under Norman Foster's practice.

Its art collection is unusually substantial for a hotel — sculpture on the terraces and lawns, works distributed through corridors and lounges, with pieces by internationally known modern and contemporary artists.

The setting does a good deal of the work: forest on one side, the city and the lake below, and a funicular that climbs up from town.