Art Hotels

The first of its line, 21c Museum Hotel Louisville occupies a row of nineteenth-century warehouses on West Main Street that were stripped back, stitched together and given over to a contemporary art museum with rooms above it. The galleries are not a lobby feature bolted onto a hotel; they run through the ground floor and stay open around the clock, free to anyone who walks in off the street, which means the building has a public life that continues long after the front desk has gone quiet.

Guest rooms are calm by comparison — high ceilings, exposed brick, deep windows onto the old commercial district — and that restraint is deliberate, because the exhibitions rotate and the rooms have to survive whatever arrives next. Service follows the same logic: staff are as ready to explain a video installation as to arrange a late check-out.

What holds the whole thing together is the building itself. The bourbon warehouses were saved rather than replaced, and you can still read their original purpose in the floor plates, the freight-scale doorways and the way the corridors bend to accommodate walls that were never meant to be interior.

Villa Amistà is a Venetian country house in the hills above Verona, sixteenth century in its bones, restored over years and then handed to a designer who had no interest in pretending the twentieth century had not happened. Frescoed ceilings sit above furniture with impossible silhouettes; a corridor of restrained plasterwork opens onto a room where the colour is the loudest thing present.

The collision is the point, and it is handled with more care than the photographs suggest. Rooms differ enormously from one another — some almost monastic, some theatrical — so the hotel tends to ask returning guests what kind of stay they are after before assigning one.

Around the villa there is a park, a pool set into the lawn, and a view over vineyards that supplies the quiet the interiors deliberately withhold. It functions, in the end, as a comfortable country hotel; the collection is what you notice on the way through it.

Above Zurich, on the edge of the forest that separates the city from its own hillside, the Dolder Grand keeps two things in balance that rarely coexist easily: a nineteenth-century resort hotel and a serious collection of modern and contemporary art. Works stand in corridors, on stair landings, in the spa, outside on the terraces. There is no separate gallery wing — the collection is simply distributed through the working hotel.

The original curved timber-and-turret building has been extended by two wings that curl away from it, and the seam between old and new is where the hotel is most itself: heavy historic massing on one side, a long horizontal glazed sweep on the other, with the city laid out below.

As a place to stay it is conventional in the best sense — large rooms, a substantial spa, restaurants that carry their own reputations — which is precisely what lets the art register as something more than decoration.

The Fuchspalast was conceived as a single artwork that happens to contain a hotel. Ernst Fuchs designed it around the zodiac: twelve floors, twelve themes, and rooms whose colour, imagery and detailing follow whichever sign they belong to. Guests are usually asked their birth date at reservation, not as a gimmick but because it determines where they sleep.

This is a small provincial hotel in a Carinthian market town, and it makes no attempt to be luxurious. Rooms are modest in size, breakfast is straightforward, and the staff are matter-of-fact about the building's strangeness in a way that suits it.

What is unusual is the completeness of the idea. Facade, stairwell, ceiling, door handle and carpet were all drawn into the same scheme, so the hotel never breaks character — there is no neutral back-of-house register to retreat into, and that consistency is what people remember.