Hotels that keep a collection
An art hotel earns the label when the art is not decoration. In the entries below that means a free public museum in a converted warehouse, a building given over to one painter, a collection of several hundred works spread through a seafront tower, and a Swiss estate that treats its corridors and grounds as hanging space.
What the four have in common is that a guest cannot avoid the collection. It is in the route from the lift to the room, or on the way to the pool, rather than gathered in a gallery you might decide to skip.
Art
21c Museum Hotel Louisville
Louisville, Kentucky, United States
The first of the 21c properties occupies a run of nineteenth-century tobacco and bourbon warehouses on West Main Street, and it treats the ground floor as a genuine museum rather than a lobby with pictures in it. The galleries are open to anyone who walks in, free of charge, at hours that stretch well past the point when most hotel public spaces quietly empty out.
Rooms sit above all of this and are deliberately calmer than the exhibitions below — brick, tall windows, restrained furnishing — so that the art stays an event you go down to rather than something competing with you at breakfast. The rotating programme means a return visit a year later is a genuinely different building.
- Contemporary art museum on site
- Free public galleries
- Converted warehouse row
Art
The Cullen
Prahran, Melbourne, Australia
Named for the Australian painter Adam Cullen, this Melbourne hotel takes the unusual step of committing itself to a single artist rather than a broad collection. Reproductions and originals run through corridors, rooms and lifts, and the effect is closer to living inside a monograph than visiting a group show.
It sits in Prahran, close enough to Chapel Street that the neighbourhood does much of the work in the evening. The building is a converted commercial block, and the rooms keep the deep floorplates and big windows of that earlier life.
- Built around one artist's work
- Inner-suburb setting
- Part of a small art-led group
Art
Hotel Arts Barcelona
Port Olímpic, Barcelona, Spain
A hotel does not usually assemble a collection of Spanish and Catalan contemporary work numbering in the hundreds of pieces, but Hotel Arts has, and it distributes them through a forty-something-storey tower on the Barcelona waterfront rather than concentrating them in one gallery.
The result is a building you read gradually: something in a lift lobby, something else at the end of a corridor, a large commissioned piece where the tower meets the seafront promenade. The architecture itself — steel exoskeleton, glass, the Olympic-era optimism of the early nineties — is part of what people come to look at.
- Large permanent collection
- Seafront tower
- Sculpture in the public spaces
Art
The Dolder Grand
Zürich, Switzerland
Above Zürich, on the Adlisberg slope, the Dolder Grand pairs a nineteenth-century resort building with a later wing that wraps around it, and it uses the seam between the two as a place to hang serious work. The collection is spread across corridors, terraces, the spa and the grounds rather than hidden in private rooms.
Guests tend to encounter it while going somewhere else — on the way to the pool, or crossing from the old house to the new. That casualness is the point; the hotel is not asking anyone to make a special trip to a gallery floor.
- Collection across the whole estate
- Hillside above the city
- Historic building with a modern wing