Art Hotels

The Louisville property is the original of its family, occupying a run of nineteenth-century tobacco and bourbon warehouses on West Main Street. The ground floor is a genuine museum: free, open long hours, staffed by gallery attendants rather than bellhops, and used by people from the neighbourhood who have no intention of booking a room. Guests arrive through that museum, which sets the terms of the stay before the check-in card is signed.

Upstairs the rooms are calm and rather plainly finished, which is a deliberate counterweight. Exposed brick, generous ceiling height, restrained furniture — the visual noise is kept downstairs where it belongs. Rotating exhibitions mean returning guests rarely encounter the same building twice, and the hotel makes no attempt to hide the fact that installations sometimes appear in corridors, stairwells and, notoriously, the restrooms.

Service runs on ordinary hotel logic. There is a restaurant, meeting space, valet parking and the usual apparatus of a mid-size American city hotel. The art programme sits alongside all of that rather than replacing it, which is why it works.

Reopened after a top-to-bottom reimagining by Philippe Starck, Le Royal Monceau kept the bones of a 1920s grand hotel near the Arc de Triomphe and rebuilt everything else around a cultural programme. There is a bookshop devoted to art titles, a private screening room, and a gallery space that mounts its own exhibitions rather than borrowing hotel-lobby filler.

The much-discussed art concierge is not a gimmick as far as day-to-day use goes: the role exists to route guests into the wider Parisian art calendar, which is dense, badly signposted and often sold out. Having someone salaried to know what opened this week is a practical service in a city like this one.

As a place to stay it remains firmly a luxury Paris hotel — long corridors, a serious spa below ground, room service that arrives properly plated. Guitars in the suites and mirrors set at odd angles are the Starck signature, and they read as playful rather than punishing.

The house rule across the art'otel group is that each property is given over to a single signature artist, and the Amsterdam building follows it closely. Work by that artist appears in guest rooms, in the corridors, in the restaurant and in the gallery on the lower floors, so the effect is less a survey than a sustained argument in one voice.

Its position, facing the water opposite Centraal Station, gives it a job to do beyond the art: it is the first and last building many visitors deal with, and it handles luggage, early arrivals and late trains with more patience than the location would suggest. Rooms are compact by international standards and generous by Amsterdam ones.

The gallery is open to non-residents and programmes independently of the guest floors, which keeps the building from turning into a private collection with beds in it.

Sitting above Zürich on the Adlisberg, the Dolder Grand is a nineteenth-century curhaus extended by Norman Foster with two flanking wings. The historic centre block and the new wings are held together by a collection that is unusually strong for a hotel, ranging from modern classics to substantial contemporary pieces installed in the gardens and along the guest corridors.

Because the property functions as a resort — spa, golf nearby, long lunches on the terrace, a shuttle down into the city — the art tends to be encountered slowly and in passing rather than in a dedicated visit. Printed guides and guided walks exist for guests who want the systematic version.

It is a large, formal hotel with the staffing levels to match, and it behaves like one. The collection is the reason it appears here; the reason people book is usually the view down over the lake.