Art Hotels

A row of nineteenth-century tobacco and bourbon warehouses on West Main Street was hollowed out and stitched back together to make this hotel, and the seams still show in the best way: brick piers, cast-iron columns, freight-scale doorways. The ground floor is a contemporary art museum that never closes and never charges, which means the lobby is a public room first and a hotel lobby second.

Rooms sit above the galleries and are calmer than the floors below them — pale walls, deep windows, generous bathrooms, a bed that does not have to compete with anything. Guests tend to describe the stay as two separate experiences stacked on top of each other, and the hotel does nothing to blur the line.

Service is unusually informed. Front desk staff can tell you what changed in the exhibition since last month, and the restaurant off the lobby is a working local dining room rather than a captive one. The building's own signature — a flock of red plastic penguins that migrate around the property — has become the least serious and most recognisable thing about a hotel that otherwise takes curation very seriously.

Built as a grand curhaus above Zurich in the late nineteenth century and reworked a hundred-odd years later with a pair of long modern wings, the Dolder Grand is a hotel with two architectural personalities and no apparent anxiety about it. The historic centre keeps its turrets and its stair hall; the new wings curve away from it in glass and pale metal.

Art is not decoration here — it is inventoried. Sculpture stands in the corridors and on the lawn, and the collection is strong enough that guests are given a route to walk it. The effect on the interiors is that hallways matter as much as rooms, which is rare in a hotel of this size.

The rest of it is straightforwardly a resort: a large spa cut into the hillside, a golf course next door, dining rooms that operate at serious ambition, and views down over the lake that explain why the site was chosen in the first place. It is formal without being stiff, and the staff are practised at moving between the two registers.

This one is built on a simple, slightly stubborn premise: one hotel, one living artist, everywhere. The chosen artist's work sets the palette, the prints in the corridors, the pattern behind the reception desk and the pieces hung in the rooms, so the building reads as a single continuous commission rather than a collection assembled over years.

It sits on the water opposite Amsterdam Central, in a tall new building with a gallery on the lower floors that is open to people who are not staying. Upstairs the rooms are compact by international standards and worked hard: good storage, blackout that actually works, windows that make the canal traffic part of the room.

There is a pool and a small spa, a bar with a view back across the IJ, and a location that removes most transport questions from a stay in the city. What it does not do is pretend to be a museum. The art is the house style, not the house's reason for existing, and the hotel is comfortable saying so.

Few hotels have committed to art as infrastructure quite this literally. Le Royal Monceau keeps a gallery, an art bookshop and an art concierge whose job is to get guests into the city's shows, including the ones that are difficult to get into. The rest of the hotel is arranged so that none of that feels like a bolt-on.

The interiors, reworked by Philippe Starck, are theatrical in a low-lit, layered way — mirrors leaning against walls, guitars in rooms, drapes used as architecture. Rooms are large for Paris and finished softly, and the suites at the top of the building are among the most photographed private rooms in the city.

Downstairs there is a long marble pool, a spa that takes its treatments seriously, and restaurants that draw Parisians rather than only guests. It stands a short walk from the Arc de Triomphe on a broad avenue, which gives it the calm that a hotel this size needs and the address that its clientele expect.