Art Hotel
Le Royal Monceau – Raffles Paris
Paris, France
Le Royal Monceau is a grand Paris hotel that decided, during a full reworking by Philippe Starck, to put a functioning contemporary art gallery inside itself. The gallery is not a corridor of framed prints; it programmes exhibitions, and it is open to people who are not staying in the building.
Alongside it sit an art bookshop and a small screening room, and the hotel keeps an art concierge whose job is to steer guests toward whatever is actually worth seeing in Paris that week. For a city with this much competition for attention, that is a more useful service than it first sounds.
The rest of the property behaves like the luxury hotel it is — spa, restaurants, a courtyard garden — so the art programme adds to the stay rather than defining every part of it.
Art gallery on siteDedicated art conciergeScreening room and art bookshop
Art Hotel
Faena Hotel Miami Beach
Miami Beach, Florida, United States
Faena occupies a restored oceanfront building from the 1940s and fills it with commissioned work at a scale most hotels would not attempt. The murals, the sculpture, the theatrical red of the interiors: none of it is subtle, and none of it is accidental.
The hotel anchors a wider district of buildings under the same name, which means the art extends past the lobby doors and into the surrounding blocks. Guests tend to end up walking it.
Practically, it works as a beach hotel: pool, sand, restaurants, and a cabaret theatre that programmes its own shows. The art is what people describe afterwards, but it is not what the building runs on day to day.
Commissioned large-scale artworksRestored 1940s oceanfront buildingCabaret theatre on site
Art Hotel
Byblos Art Hotel Villa Amistà
Verona, Italy
Villa Amistà is a Renaissance villa in the hills outside Verona, restored and then hung with a serious contemporary collection. The friction between the two — frescoed ceilings above work made five centuries later — is the entire point, and it is handled with more confidence than the description suggests.
Rooms are individually laid out, as they must be in a building of this age, and the gardens do a lot of the work in summer. It is a countryside hotel first, with Verona a short drive away for anyone who wants the city.
Guests who arrive expecting a themed novelty usually leave describing it as a house museum that happens to let people sleep in it.
Contemporary collection in a historic villaRenaissance-era building in the countrysideGardens and outdoor pool
Art Hotel
Kunsthotel Fuchspalast
St. Veit an der Glan, Austria
The Fuchspalast is a small Austrian hotel where each room was given over to a different artist, working to a loose scheme organised around the zodiac. The result is inconsistent in the best sense: one room is calm and another is not, and you do not really choose so much as get assigned a world for the night.
Ernst Fuchs, who gave the building its name and much of its character, set the tone with the exterior and the public rooms. Everything inside is signed work rather than commissioned decor.
St. Veit an der Glan is a modest Carinthian town, and the hotel makes no pretence of being anything but part of it. That ordinariness is what keeps the concept from tipping over.
Rooms designed by individual artistsAstrological design concept across floorsSmall-town Carinthian setting