Category one · Four hotels

Art Hotels

Hotels where the collection is not decoration bolted on at the end. In each of these four, somebody decided early that the walls, the corridors and sometimes the rooms themselves would carry work worth stopping for — and then built a functioning hotel around that decision.

Kunsthotel Fuchspalast

St. Veit an der Glan, Austria

The Fuchspalast is not a hotel with art in it; it is a hotel that the Viennese painter Ernst Fuchs designed as a single work, from the facade down to the fittings. Rooms are built around the signs of the zodiac, and each one carries its own colour scheme, its own imagery and its own logic.

That makes it an unusually strong-flavoured place to sleep. There is no neutral room to retreat to, and the small Carinthian town outside is entirely ordinary by comparison, which sharpens the contrast. Guests either commit to the idea or find it exhausting; almost nobody is indifferent.

Hotel Krafft

Basel, Switzerland

A nineteenth-century building on the Rhine embankment, restored rather than modernised, with a cast-iron spiral staircase running up through the middle of it and a dining room facing the river. The art here is contemporary and deliberately understated — pieces placed in corridors and rooms where you meet them without being announced to.

Basel gives the hotel its context. During the city's art week the place fills with people who have spent the day looking at work and want to keep talking about it, and the ground floor turns into one long conversation. Out of season it goes back to being a calm riverside hotel with good food.

Gladstone House

Toronto, Canada

Toronto's oldest continuously operating hotel building, a red-brick Victorian on Queen Street West, kept its hand-operated elevator and its long association with the artists of the surrounding neighbourhood through a full renovation. Rooms were shaped by commissioned artists and designers rather than a single decorator, so no two floors read alike.

The public rooms carry more of the programme than the bedrooms do — exhibitions, readings and music that draw a local crowd rather than a hotel crowd. Staying here means the lobby is busy with people who are not guests, which is a fair description of the neighbourhood as well.

Boro Hotel

Long Island City, New York, United States

Boro was built new rather than converted, in an industrial pocket of Queens, and it keeps the raw vocabulary of that area: exposed concrete, steel-framed glass, unfinished ceilings. The work on the walls comes largely from artists based in the same few blocks, so building and contents share an address.

Rooms are large by New York standards, and many of them look straight across the river at the Manhattan skyline, which becomes the biggest picture in the hotel. Mornings happen in a double-height lobby full of people working through a coffee; nothing about the place is formal.

Reading the category

None of these four call themselves museums, and the distinction matters. A museum arranges its collection for viewing; a hotel has to keep it alive around luggage, breakfast service and people who arrived at two in the morning. What they share is that the art was budgeted for at the start rather than chosen from a catalogue at the end.