Art Hotels

The building that houses 21c Louisville was a row of nineteenth-century tobacco and bourbon warehouses before it was anything else, and the conversion left the brick, the timber and the awkward floor levels largely intact. What was added is a contemporary art museum that occupies the ground floor and spills upward — free to enter, open late, staffed by people whose job is genuinely to talk about the work rather than to guard it.

Guests arrive through the galleries, which is the point. Rotating exhibitions change the route between the front door and the lift often enough that regulars notice, and site-specific commissions turn up in places a museum would not normally put them: stairwells, corridors, the restrooms. The guest rooms themselves are quieter than the public floors, with high ceilings, plain walls and a deliberate absence of competing decoration.

It is also a working hotel in a working downtown, a short walk from the Ohio River and the theatre district, with a restaurant that draws as many locals as residents.

Perched on the Adlisberg above Zurich, the Dolder Grand began life in 1899 as a curhaus — a half-timbered resort reached by funicular, built for people who came up the hill for the air. A long closure in the 2000s and a Norman Foster intervention added two curved wings to either side of the original silhouette, and the join between the two eras is left legible rather than disguised.

The art is not decoration bought by the metre. The collection is substantial, catalogued, and hung throughout the public rooms and corridors, with pieces by internationally known artists placed where guests will meet them on the way to dinner rather than in a dedicated gallery. A printed guide lets you walk the house as a collection if you want to.

Below all of this sits a large spa cut into the hillside, and above it, on clear days, a view across the city to the lake and the Alps beyond.

Few hotels are built as a single artistic scheme from the foundations up. The Fuchspalast is: Ernst Fuchs, the Viennese painter, designed the building around the twelve signs of the zodiac, and each guest room was then handed to a different artist to complete. The result is uneven in the way that any genuine collaboration is uneven, and far more interesting for it.

The exterior is unmistakable from the road — a gold-and-colour facade rising over a small Carinthian market town that otherwise keeps to its medieval square. Inside, the zodiac scheme governs the layout, the stairwell and the glass, so the decoration is structural rather than applied.

Sankt Veit itself is compact, walkable and unhurried, which makes the hotel's strangeness land harder than it would in a city.

Hôtel des Arts sits in District 3, a little back from the commercial noise of District 1, and takes its cue from mid-century Indochine interiors: lacquer, rattan, dark timber and a deep colour palette. The owner's collection of Vietnamese art and antiques is hung and placed throughout the public rooms, concentrated heavily in the lobby and the corridors of the lower floors.

The tower is tall enough that the upper storeys clear their neighbours, and the rooftop bar and pool sit near the top of it. The effect is unusual for the city — an interior that looks backward by fifty years, wrapped in a building that looks out over a skyline still visibly under construction.

Service leans formal. Afternoon tea is taken seriously, and the ground-floor bar keeps a jazz programme.