Category 01 of 04 · Four properties

Art Hotels

Art hotels are easy to claim and harder to earn. The four properties below all pass a plain test: remove the art and the hotel would be a different building.

One is a museum with rooms above it. One hangs decades of accumulated work in its bedrooms. One distributes a serious collection through its corridors, and one takes a single painter as its whole organising idea.

01.1

Paris, France

Art concierge
Gallery and bookshop
Screening room

Le Royal Monceau – Raffles Paris

A grand hotel that keeps an art concierge and a screening room.

Reworked by Philippe Starck behind a 1928 facade near the Arc de Triomphe, Le Royal Monceau treats contemporary art as part of the service rather than part of the decor. The hotel keeps an art concierge, a small bookshop of art titles, and a gallery space used for changing shows.

Guest rooms carry works and photographs chosen for the building, and an acoustically treated screening room sits below the public floors.

The result is a grand Parisian hotel that has been argued with rather than restored: proportions and address are traditional, almost nothing else is.

01.2

Cape Town, South Africa

Converted grain silo
Museum in the same building
Pillowed glass windows

The Silo Hotel

Rooms in a converted grain silo, directly above a museum.

The Silo occupies the upper floors of a 1920s grain elevator on the Cape Town waterfront, with the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa filling the concrete tubes below. Guests share the building with the collection, which is the clearest version of this idea anywhere.

Thomas Heatherwick's pillowed glass windows bulge out of the original concrete frame and give the rooms their shape; the interiors are deliberately bright and eclectic against that industrial shell.

Views run from Table Mountain on one side to the harbour on the other, and the museum entrance is a lift ride away.

01.3

Verona, Italy

Renaissance villa
Contemporary collection
Mendini interiors

Byblos Art Hotel Villa Amistà

A Renaissance villa hung with a contemporary collection.

Villa Amistà stands in the hills outside Verona, a fifteenth-century house later remodelled in the baroque manner and now given over to a contemporary collection that runs through its rooms.

The confrontation is the point: frescoed ceilings above, sharply modern work below, and interiors by Alessandro Mendini holding the two together in colour rather than pretending they agree.

The grounds are formal and quiet, and the vineyards of Valpolicella begin more or less at the gate.

01.4

Barcelona, Spain

Waterfront tower
Spanish contemporary collection
Beachfront position

Hotel Arts Barcelona

A seafront tower with a serious collection of Spanish art.

Hotel Arts occupies one of the two towers built on the Barcelona waterfront for the 1992 Games, and it has been collecting Spanish and Catalan contemporary art since it opened.

Work is placed through the public rooms and corridors rather than gathered into a single gallery, so the collection is met in passing across a lot of floors.

Frank Gehry's copper fish sculpture sits between the tower and the beach, and the hotel's lower levels open straight onto the seafront promenade.