Art Hotels
Hotels where the collection, the commission or the building itself is the reason to stay — not a lobby print, but a programme.
Art hotels earn the label in different ways. Some house a public museum on the ground floor; some hang a rotating programme in the corridors; some hand entire rooms to artists and let the results disagree with each other. What the four below share is that the art is structural to the place rather than applied to it afterwards, and that each remains, first and last, a hotel you can sleep in.
The entries
21c Museum Hotel Louisville
Louisville's 21c began as a pair of nineteenth-century tobacco and bourbon warehouses on West Main Street, and the conversion left the brick, the timber and the long narrow proportions largely intact. What was added is a contemporary art museum that occupies the ground floor and spills into the corridors, lift lobbies and stairwells above it.
Guests walk through the exhibitions on the way to their rooms, which is the point. The galleries are open to the public without charge and keep long hours, so the hotel behaves like a civic building that happens to have bedrooms attached. Rooms themselves are plain by comparison — pale walls, good light, art kept deliberately sparse so the public floors carry the weight.
The Dolder Grand, Zurich
Above Zurich, at the edge of the forest on the Adlisberg, the Dolder Grand keeps the silhouette of the 1899 curhaus it started as, with a pair of modern wings set behind the old turreted front. The art is not decorative filler: works by well-known twentieth- and twenty-first-century figures are hung and placed throughout the halls, lounges and garden terraces, and the hotel publishes a guide to them.
The effect is of a country house that has kept collecting for a century. Views run down over the city to the lake and, on clear days, to the Alps beyond it.
Kunsthotel Fuchspalast, St. Veit an der Glan
In the small Carinthian town of St. Veit an der Glan, the Fuchspalast was built as a collaboration between architects and the painter Ernst Fuchs, and it shows from the street: the facade is patterned and coloured in a way no ordinary provincial hotel would risk.
Inside, rooms are themed and individually designed, several of them by different artists, so no two stays repeat. It is a hotel that treats a modest scale as licence rather than limitation — the kind of place people detour for.
Arthotel Blaue Gans, Salzburg
The Blaue Gans sits on the Getreidegasse in Salzburg's old town, in a building that has functioned as an inn for roughly six hundred years. Vaulted ceilings, thick walls and awkward, generous stairwells survive from that history.
Against them the hotel hangs a rotating programme of contemporary art, much of it by Austrian artists, in the corridors and the vaulted ground-floor rooms. The contrast is the argument: new work in very old spaces, with neither asked to pretend the other isn't there.