Art Hotels

The hotel occupies a run of nineteenth-century tobacco and bourbon warehouses on West Main Street, and the conversion left the bones honestly visible: brick piers, heavy timber, freight-scale openings. What was added is a museum. Galleries run through the ground floor and down corridors that guests share with visitors who never book a room, because admission is free and the doors stay open around the clock.

Rooms sit above all this and are deliberately calm — pale, generously proportioned, hung with a small number of works rather than a gallery's worth. Service is unfussy and knows exactly what people come for; ask at the desk about the current exhibition and you will get an answer rather than a brochure. Staying here means passing through an installation on the way to breakfast, which is the point.

A 1920s address near the Arc de Triomphe, reopened after a Philippe Starck redesign that treated the whole building as a set: mirrors leaning against walls as though just delivered, guitars in the suites, a bookshop and a screening room downstairs. The result is theatrical without tipping into costume.

The art programme is the part that distinguishes it from other grand Paris hotels. There is a dedicated art concierge, a gallery space that changes over, and a habit of pointing guests toward what is worth seeing across the city that week. Rooms are plush and softly lit; the service is old-school Parisian in the best sense, which is to say attentive and entirely unhurried.

Set in the vineyards outside Verona, this is a fifteenth-century villa that was frescoed in the Renaissance and then, several centuries later, filled with contemporary art and furniture by a fashion house that could not resist the collision. Frescoes and video work occupy the same rooms. It should not hold together, and yet it does.

Each room is individually done, so no two stays repeat; some are quiet and pale, others emphatically coloured. Outside, formal gardens give way to Valpolicella hillsides, and the pace of the place slows accordingly. Guests tend to arrive for the art and stay for the terrace.

The original 1899 building reads as a small castle on the hill above Zurich; the two wings Norman Foster added curve away from it in glass and pale stone. Between them sits one of the largest private art collections you will find inside a working hotel, distributed through corridors, lounges and the gardens rather than penned into a single gallery.

A stay is spa-shaped as much as art-shaped — the underground spa is enormous, and the lake view from the terrace does a lot of the work. Service is precise in the Swiss manner. Ask for the collection map at check-in; you will otherwise walk past a Warhol on the way to dinner without noticing.