Art Hotels

A grand hotel a short walk from the Arc de Triomphe that decided, in the late 2000s, to stop behaving like a museum of its own past. Philippe Starck's redesign left the bones of the 1928 building intact and then filled them with something closer to a working studio: guitars leaning in corners, mirrors propped rather than hung, drawings pinned as if the room were still being decided.

What separates it from hotels that merely hang canvases in the lift lobby is that the art programme has staff and opening hours. There is a gallery open to the street, an art bookshop, a screening room, and a dedicated art concierge whose job is to route guests through whatever Paris happens to be showing that week. The collection turns over; the hotel treats it as inventory rather than decoration.

A stay reads as unusually informal for the address. Rooms are generous and cluttered on purpose, the pool and spa are among the largest in central Paris, and service manages to be attentive without the starch you might brace for. If you want a Paris hotel where the art is the reason rather than the garnish, this is the reliable answer.

Venice is full of hotels that borrow the past wholesale. This one, set in a Gothic palazzo on the Dorsoduro side of the Grand Canal, does something rarer: it keeps the shell honest and makes the interior unmistakably contemporary. Saturated colour, sculptural furniture and modern lighting sit inside vaulted rooms that have been there for centuries, and the friction between the two is the point.

Its location does much of the curatorial work. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Punta della Dogana are minutes away on foot, which makes the hotel a natural base during the Biennale and quieter but no less useful outside it. Canal-facing rooms look across to the Salute; the ones at the back look into a walled garden, which in Venice is its own kind of luxury.

Expect a small hotel rather than a grand one. Breakfast on the terrace, a bar that fills with people comparing what they saw that day, and staff who will tell you honestly which pavilions are worth the queue.

The building is new; the mood it recreates is 1930s Indochine. What makes the hotel more than a period pastiche is the art itself — a private collection of Vietnamese painting and sculpture distributed through corridors, landings and public rooms rather than concentrated in a single lobby display, so the collection unfolds as you move through the building.

Rooms are dark-timbered and deliberately unmodern in feel, with lacquer, brass and heavy fabrics. The rooftop is the other half of the argument: a pool and bar high above District 1, with the city's traffic reduced to a sound rather than an obstacle. Guests tend to divide their day between the two extremes.

It suits travellers who want a hotel with a specific point of view about where it is. The staff are used to guests asking about the paintings, and will happily explain who made what.

Designed by the Italian architect Aldo Rossi and completed in 1989, Il Palazzo is one of the few hotels anywhere that is itself the most important object in the building. Its striped travertine façade and colonnade were an argument about civic architecture dropped into a Japanese riverside district, and it has been photographed and studied ever since.

Inside, the interest continues at the level of individual rooms and bars, several of which were designed by leading Japanese designers of the period, Shiro Kuramata among them. The hotel has been refurbished more than once without losing that inheritance, and it remains a pilgrimage for people who care about late-twentieth-century design.

Practically, it is a comfortable mid-size city hotel in Nakasu, close to Fukuoka's food stalls and canal-side nightlife. You do not have to care about Rossi to enjoy staying here — but if you do, few hotels give you more to look at before you have even unpacked.