Art Hotels

21c began as a contemporary art museum that happened to need bedrooms, and the order of those two things still shows. The galleries on the ground floor of the Main Street warehouses are open around the clock and free to walk into, so the lobby never behaves like a lobby; guests come down at two in the morning and find someone from the neighbourhood standing in front of a video piece. Rooms sit above all of this in a set of restored nineteenth-century tobacco and bourbon buildings, with brick, tall sash windows and heavy timber left visible.

What a stay feels like depends heavily on which exhibition is up, because the hotel rotates its shows rather than hanging a permanent collection and leaving it. Service is unfussy and Southern in the good sense. The restaurant off the lobby draws as many locals as guests, which keeps the place from calcifying into an art-world enclave, and the red plastic penguins that wander the building are the one piece of whimsy the property allows itself.

Few grand Paris hotels have been reimagined as thoroughly as this one. When Philippe Starck reworked the interiors, he gave the house an art bookshop, a private screening room and a dedicated art concierge, and hung work throughout the public rooms rather than reserving it for a single curated corridor. The result reads as a collector's apartment scaled up to hotel size — guitars left out to be played, mirrors leaning rather than fixed, deliberate asymmetry in rooms that could easily have been symmetrical.

It is still, underneath the staging, a full grand hotel a short walk from the Arc de Triomphe: two restaurants, a long spa in the basement, and staff who have clearly been doing this a long while. Guests who come for the art programme tend to stay for the quieter things, the courtyard gardens in particular. Those who arrive expecting classical Belle Époque plasterwork are the ones most surprised.

On the hillside above Zurich, the Dolder Grand joins an 1899 half-timbered resort building to two curved modern wings by Norman Foster, and then runs a serious art collection across the seam. Works are placed in corridors, on landings and outdoors on the lawns, so the walk from the lift to a room is genuinely part of the visit. The hotel publishes a guide to the collection and encourages guests to work through it on foot.

The stay itself is alpine-adjacent rather than urban: forest on one side, the lake and the city below, a very large spa cut into the hill. Rooms in the historic core keep their gables and odd angles; the wing rooms are calmer and glassier. It is a hotel people return to for decades, and the art has become part of why.

The Cullen is named for the Australian painter Adam Cullen, whose work supplies the visual key to the whole building — blunt, high-contrast, occasionally uncomfortable canvases reproduced at wall scale in the rooms and lobby. It is the least reverent hotel in this category and the better for it. The building is a converted medical centre in Prahran, and the conversion has not been smoothed over.

Downstairs the hotel opens straight onto Commercial Road, which means the surrounding neighbourhood does much of the work of entertaining guests. Rooms are practical, many with kitchenettes, aimed at people staying a week rather than a night. If the art in Paris and Zurich is treated as a collection, here it is treated as a personality.