Art Hotels

A sixteenth-century villa in the hills west of Verona, remodelled by Alessandro Mendini into something that argues with itself on purpose. Frescoed ceilings stay where they were; underneath them sit saturated colour fields, moulded plastic furniture and lighting that would be at home in a design fair. The friction is the point, and it is handled with more wit than most conversions of this kind manage.

The collection runs to contemporary work — sculpture in the garden, photography and painting through the public rooms and corridors — and it is genuinely hung rather than decoratively arranged. Rooms differ substantially from one another; the ones in the older part of the villa are grander and more irregular, while the newer wing trades some of that character for consistency.

As a hotel it is a country property first: gardens, a pool, a restaurant that expects you to sit down properly, and a quiet that is total once the last car leaves. Verona is a short drive, which is how most guests use it — days in the city, evenings back in the hills.

21c began with a straightforward proposition: put a free, properly staffed contemporary art museum on the ground floor of a hotel and keep it open around the clock. The Louisville building was the first, carved out of a row of nineteenth-century warehouses on West Main Street, and it still feels like the prototype — a little rougher and more convincing than the copies.

Because the galleries are public and never close, the hotel has an unusual rhythm. People wander in off the street at odd hours. Guests come down for a coffee and end up walking a show they did not plan to see. The curatorial programme is exhibition-led and changes on a real schedule, so a second visit is not a repeat of the first.

The rooms are calmer than the galleries, which is a deliberate choice and a sensible one. Exposed brick, high ceilings, restrained palettes, and one or two pieces per room rather than a saturation approach. Service is Midwestern and unfussy. The restaurant does a serious job and is used by the city, not only by guests.

A tower in District 1 that reaches back to mid-century Indochine interiors — lacquer, dark timber, patterned tile, brass — and then hangs Vietnamese art across almost every surface it can reach. The collection leans local and modern, and it is dense: stairwells, landings and corridors are all in use, not just the lobby.

The building's best-known feature is the rooftop, where a pool and bar sit high over the city and are busy most evenings. That popularity cuts both ways. Guests who want the view at its quietest go up early; guests who want the atmosphere go up late and accept the crowd.

Underneath the styling it operates as a full-service city hotel — a proper breakfast, a spa, staff who are used to arranging cars and translating restaurant bookings. Rooms on the higher floors are worth asking for, mostly for the light.

Above Zurich, on the Adlisberg, a nineteenth-century resort with two modern wings grafted on by Foster + Partners. The old building keeps its turrets and its formality; the wings are quiet, curved and glassy. Between them the hotel holds a substantial collection of modern and contemporary art that is signed, catalogued and shown seriously — the sort of holding that comes with a curator rather than an interior designer.

Art here is not confined to a gallery. It is placed along the corridors, in the spa, in the restaurants, and at the entrance, where it is the first thing a guest meets. The hotel publishes and guides the collection, which is a fair signal of intent.

Everything else is at the standard the address implies: a very large spa, dining at several registers, and a funicular-and-tram connection down into the city that takes a matter of minutes. It is a resort hotel in reach of a financial capital, which is a rare combination and the reason it stays full.