Category · 4 entries

Art Hotels

Hotels where the collection, the commissions and the architecture are the reason to stay.

Hotels that are also collections

The entries

Every hotel hangs something on a wall. The four here go considerably further: the art is commissioned, curated or built into the structure, and in more than one case the public can walk in to see it without ever taking a room. What follows describes what each building holds and how the collection changes the experience of staying.

21c Museum Hotel Louisville

The first of its line, 21c Museum Hotel Louisville occupies a run of nineteenth-century warehouses on West Main Street and treats its ground floor as a genuine public museum rather than a lobby with pictures in it. Exhibitions rotate, admission to them is free, and the galleries keep hours that stretch well past the point most hotel public rooms go quiet. Guest rooms sit above the exhibition spaces, plainly finished so that the work downstairs stays the loudest thing in the building. Staff are used to visitors who arrive to look and never check in.

The Dolder Grand, Zurich

Above Zurich, on the wooded slope of the Adlisberg, the Dolder Grand pairs a turreted nineteenth-century curhaus with two curved modern wings added in the 2000s. Art is distributed through the whole property rather than gathered into a gallery: sculpture in the grounds and corridors, painting and photography along the circulation routes, pieces sited where guests pass rather than where they queue. The effect is less museum than private collection that happens to have four hundred beds attached. The setting does much of the work, with the lake laid out below the terrace.

The Silo Hotel, Cape Town

The Silo sits in the upper floors of a disused grain elevator at the V&A Waterfront, directly above the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, which occupies the tubes below. Its most recognisable feature is the pillowed glazing — bulging, faceted panes cut into the concrete grid — which reads from outside as something between a lantern and an insect eye. Interiors lean hard into colour and pattern rather than the restraint the shell might suggest. Guests can reach the museum without going outdoors, which in a Cape winter is not a trivial advantage.

Palacio Duhau – Park Hyatt Buenos Aires

Two buildings make up the Palacio Duhau in Recoleta: a 1930s residence built in French classical manner for the Duhau family, and a contemporary tower behind it. They are linked by an underground passage lined as a gallery, so crossing between the old house and the new one means walking past rotating exhibitions of Argentine work. Between the two sits a terraced garden that steps down the slope of the block, a rare amount of open ground for that part of the city. The older building keeps its panelling, its staircase and its proportions largely intact.