Art Hotels — Future Machine Girls

About this category

An art hotel is still a hotel. Somebody has to change the linen, carry a suitcase up a staircase that was never designed for wheels, and explain the breakfast hours to a guest who arrived at four in the morning. What separates the four properties on this page from a hotel that simply owns paintings is the order in which the decisions were made. Here the art came first, or at least early enough to shape corridors, ceiling heights and the way a lobby asks you to stand in it.

The entries below describe buildings, rooms and service. Where a collection matters we say why it matters to a guest — whether you walk past it on the way to the lift, whether it changes what the room feels like at night, whether it is the reason the hotel is shaped the way it is. Nothing here is a review and nothing here is a booking. Details change; treat the properties as the authority on their own current offering.

Corrubbio di Negarine, Italy

Byblos Art Hotel Villa Amistà

A sixteenth-century villa carrying a contemporary collection.

The house is old and makes no attempt to hide it. Frescoed ceilings, thick walls, a garden laid out long before anyone thought a villa in the Valpolicella hills might one day take paying guests — all of that survives, and the hotel has built its identity on the friction between that inheritance and the very contemporary work placed inside it. A sculpture stands where a family portrait would have hung. A saturated pink or acid green appears in a room otherwise given over to plaster and stone.

As a place to sleep, it behaves like a country house hotel. Rooms are generous rather than clever, the corridors are quiet, and much of the day drifts toward the garden and the pool. Guests tend to arrive by car, spend an afternoon doing very little, and eat late. The wine country around it is part of the proposition, though the hotel does not lean on it in the way a purpose-built resort would.

The collection is not roped off. You encounter it walking to breakfast, which is the point — the hotel wants the work to be lived alongside rather than visited. Some guests find that thrilling and some find it a lot to wake up to. It is worth knowing which kind of guest you are before booking.

Melbourne, Australia

Art Series — The Blackman

A city hotel built around one painter's work.

The Blackman takes its name and its whole reason for existing from a single Australian artist, and the hotel commits to that idea more thoroughly than most themed properties manage. Drawings and prints run through the public rooms and continue into the bedrooms, so the connection is not something you have to go looking for in a designated gallery corner.

Underneath it is a straightforward, well-run city hotel on a busy street a short walk from the gardens and the theatre district. The rooms range from compact to properly large, some with kitchenettes, most with the kind of long window that Melbourne apartments favour. Service is relaxed and unfussy. Nobody performs the art at you.

What makes it worth a paragraph in an index like this is the consistency. Many hotels hang work by many hands and call the result a collection. This one narrows the field to one body of work and lets the repetition do the arguing, which is a harder thing to pull off and a stranger thing to sleep inside.

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Hotel Not Hotel

Rooms commissioned as individual installations.

Each room here was made by a different designer or artist as a self-contained piece, which means the hotel has no room type in the ordinary sense. One is built into a tram carriage parked indoors. Another sits behind a bookcase. A third is a small timber structure standing free in a larger hall. Booking is less a matter of choosing a category than of choosing a proposition.

That sounds exhausting and mostly is not, because the building holds it together — a converted industrial space in Amsterdam West with a bar at the centre that locals use independently of the hotel. The bar is genuinely the social heart of the place, and if you want an early night it is worth asking where your room sits in relation to it.

Practically: rooms are small, some share facilities, and the experience rewards a short stay more than a long one. Nobody should arrive expecting a desk, a wardrobe and a kettle in the usual arrangement. What you get instead is a night spent inside an object somebody made on purpose.

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Faena Hotel Buenos Aires

A converted grain mill turned into a theatrical art hotel.

Faena occupies a red-brick mill in Puerto Madero, and the conversion made no attempt at restraint. Deep crimson, gilt, velvet and long processional corridors give the interior a staged quality; you are meant to feel that you have walked into a set rather than a lobby. The theatricality is the art direction, and the hotel treats the building itself as the principal work.

Beyond that, it functions as a full-service luxury hotel — a serious restaurant, a pool, a spa, a cabaret room that runs a tango programme, and the kind of staffing that anticipates rather than responds. Rooms are calmer than the public spaces, which is a mercy, though the palette follows you inside.

It belongs in an art hotels index less for what hangs on the walls than for the way the whole property was authored as a single aesthetic argument. The Faena name later attached itself to a wider cultural project elsewhere; this is where the register was set.

Keep reading

Three other kinds of room.

The rest of the index covers capsule hotels, casino hotels, ice hotels. Use the coloured band at the top of any page to move between them.