Art Hotels

The building is a row of nineteenth-century tobacco and bourbon warehouses on Main Street, stitched together into a single hotel with a contemporary art museum running through its ground floor. The museum is free, open around the clock, and genuinely public — people wander in off the street at odd hours, which gives the lobby a civic quality most hotels never achieve.

Rooms sit above all this and are calmer than the exhibitions below: brick, tall windows, deep tubs, restrained furnishing that lets the art downstairs do the talking. Works appear in corridors and even in the lift lobbies, rotating often enough that regulars return to a changed building.

The restaurant is a serious one in its own right, and the hotel has a habit of hosting talks, screenings and openings that pull in the city rather than just the guests. It is the founding property of a small group, and it still feels like the prototype — a museum that learned to put people up for the night.

A grand Right Bank address near the Arc de Triomphe, reworked by Philippe Starck into something closer to a collector's apartment than a palace hotel. Guitars lean against furniture, books are stacked with intent, and the mirrors and drapery are arranged so that every room reads as a set awaiting an occupant.

Art is not decoration here but programme: a dedicated gallery space, a resident art concierge who arranges access to studios, fairs and private collections, and a bookshop devoted to art publishing. The hotel has kept this going long enough that it has become a genuine part of the Parisian art calendar rather than a marketing line.

Beyond that, it behaves like a great Paris hotel should — a courtyard garden for lunch, a long spa beneath the building, Italian cooking of real ambition, and a staff culture that manages to be formal and unstuffy at the same time.

Set in the Valpolicella hills outside Verona, this is a Renaissance villa with baroque additions, an eighteenth-century park and a contemporary art collection that has been allowed to move in without apology. Frescoed ceilings sit above pieces by well-known living artists; a classical staircase gives out onto something loud and new.

The collision is the point, and it is handled with more wit than reverence. Furniture by contemporary designers is used rather than roped off, and the effect in the salons is of a house whose owners simply kept collecting for four hundred years.

Practically, it works as a country hotel: a pool in the garden, a well-regarded dining room, vineyards within a short drive, and Verona close enough for an evening at the opera. Guests tend to come for the art and stay for the quiet.

A hillside landmark above Zurich, originally a nineteenth-century curhouse, extended by Norman Foster with two flanking wings that curve away from the original turreted building. The result is one of the more convincing marriages of old resort architecture and contemporary design in Europe.

The collection is the surprise: a substantial holding of modern and contemporary work distributed through corridors, lounges, the spa and the grounds, with sculpture in the gardens and significant names hung where guests actually walk. Tours are offered, and they are worth an hour.

Everything else is on the same scale — a very large spa carved into the hillside, a dining room with serious culinary ambition, golf and woodland walks at the door, and views down over the lake that explain why the site was chosen in the first place.