Art Hotels · Four hotels

Hotels that collect

Every hotel hangs something on the wall. The four here go further than that: the art is commissioned, curated or public, and in each case it changes how the building is used rather than how it looks in photographs. Two of them will let anyone off the street walk through the galleries without a room key.

No. 01

21c Museum Hotel Louisville

Louisville, Kentucky

The first of the 21c properties took a run of nineteenth-century tobacco and bourbon warehouses on West Main Street and threaded a contemporary art museum through the ground floor, so that the lobby, the corridors and the stairwells all read as exhibition space. Guests walk past rotating installations on the way to breakfast, and so does anyone off the street: the galleries stay open to the public, without a ticket, for most of the day and night. Rooms above are calm and loft-proportioned, which is deliberate — the building spends its visual energy downstairs. The red penguins that wander the property have become the house signature, moved around by staff and guests until nobody is sure where they started. Contemporary art museum on siteConverted warehouse rowFree public galleries

No. 02

The Dolder Grand

Zurich, Switzerland

Above Zurich, on the forested slope of the Adlisberg, a half-timbered curiosity from 1899 was wrapped in two curving wings by Norman Foster's office and reopened as something harder to categorise. What makes it belong in this category is not the architecture but the art: works are hung in the corridors, the lounges and the stairwells rather than sequestered in one room, and the collection is substantial enough that the hotel publishes a route through it. The effect is unusual — you meet a sculpture on the way to the spa, and the spa itself is one of the largest in the Alps. The old building still holds the centre, gabled and slightly absurd against the new glass. Collection shown throughout the house1899 core, 2008 wingsHillside above the city

No. 03

The Olsen

Melbourne, Australia

Melbourne's Art Series group names each of its hotels for an Australian painter and then commits to the premise, and The Olsen is the clearest case. John Olsen's work — the loose, sun-bleached line, the frog and the estuary — appears in the public rooms and in the guest rooms, in reproduction and in original pieces, and the hotel's tone follows it: informal, warm, a little unruly. The building sits on Chapel Street in South Yarra with a glass-bottomed pool cantilevered over the entrance, which is the kind of gesture that dates badly and somehow hasn't. Rooms lean large. Many have kitchenettes, which makes long stays workable. Named for John OlsenWorks in every roomSouth Yarra, Chapel Street

No. 04

Faena Hotel Miami Beach

Miami Beach, Florida

Alan Faena bought the old Saxony Hotel, a 1947 landmark that had been sitting empty, and rebuilt it with Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin shaping the interiors — which is why the place reads as staged rather than decorated. Art here is commissioned and monumental: a gilded mammoth skeleton under glass in the garden, a mural cycle in the cathedral-ceilinged passage that runs from the street to the sea. Across the road, a restored theatre programmes cabaret and performance most nights. The red-and-gold palette is relentless and entirely on purpose. Rooms face the Atlantic, and the beach is served with the same theatrical seriousness as everything else. Commissioned installationsRestored 1947 SaxonyTheatre on the property