GK
Le Royal Monceau – Raffles Paris
Avenue Hoche, Paris, France
Philippe Starck's 2010 reworking of a 1928 hotel left the bones of the building intact and filled it with a working art programme rather than a decorative one. There is an art concierge on staff, a small gallery open to the street, and a screening room that has been used for film and lecture evenings. Guest rooms lean toward the domestic — guitars in some of them, books rather than minibars front and centre — which is an unusual register for a palace-classified hotel a few minutes from the Arc de Triomphe.
Setting Eighth arrondissement, near Parc Monceau Opened 1928; reopened 2010 Of note On-site gallery and art concierge
GK
The Dolder Grand
Kurhausstrasse, Zurich, Switzerland
A hillside hotel above Zurich that began life in 1899 as a curhaus and was extended by Norman Foster with two curved wings in 2008. What makes it an art hotel is less the architecture than the collection hung through the public rooms and corridors — sculpture on the terraces, works on paper along the passages, pieces that turn a walk to dinner into a slow circuit. The spa is large, the views run down over the lake, and the older wing still reads as a nineteenth-century resort building.
Setting Adlisberg hillside above the city Opened 1899; extended 2008 Of note Collection displayed throughout public areas
GK
21c Museum Hotel Louisville
West Main Street, Louisville, Kentucky, United States
The first of the 21c properties, built into a row of nineteenth-century tobacco and bourbon warehouses on Museum Row. The contemporary art museum occupies the ground floor and basement and stays open around the clock, free to enter, which means the hotel's lobby is genuinely a public space rather than a private one with pictures in it. Exhibitions rotate. Guest rooms above are plain by comparison, and deliberately so.
Setting Museum Row, downtown Louisville Opened 2006 Of note Free contemporary art museum open to the public
GK
Hotel Fasano Rio de Janeiro
Avenida Vieira Souto, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Philippe Starck again, in a very different key: a mid-century Brazilian idiom of rosewood, rope, leather and glass facing straight onto Ipanema beach. The interiors were assembled around period furniture and commissioned pieces rather than bought as a set, and the rooftop pool deck has become one of the more photographed rooms in the city. The building itself is a 1970s block, reworked inside and out in 2007.
Setting Ipanema beachfront Opened 2007 Of note Mid-century Brazilian furniture and commissions