Art Hotels
Three hotels where the art is not decoration applied at the end. In each case the collection, the commissions or the fabric of the building itself is a substantial part of the reason to stay, and the rooms were planned around that rather than in spite of it.
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The Whitby Hotel
New York, United States
The Whitby sits on West 56th Street, a few minutes' walk from Central Park, and makes no attempt to be discreet about its decorating. Colour arrives early and stays: the drawing room is hung salon-style, upholstery runs to strong prints, and almost every corridor turn presents something framed, glazed or cast.
The collection is contemporary and deliberately unmatched — works bought individually rather than commissioned as a set, so the walls read as an accumulation rather than a scheme. Rooms are large by Manhattan standards, many with floor-to-ceiling windows and their own terraces, and each is furnished differently enough that the room number matters.
Beyond the guest floors there is a small screening room, a spacious orangery-style bar and a lobby that functions as a public living room well into the evening. It is an art hotel in the English tradition: not a gallery with beds, but a house where the art was chosen by someone with strong opinions.
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Ham Yard Hotel
London, United Kingdom
Ham Yard occupies a whole block off Soho's Denman Street — a courtyard, a row of small shops and a hotel wrapped around them, built new but detailed as though it had accreted over decades. A bronze tree by Tony Cragg stands at the centre of the yard and gives the address its landmark.
Inside, the art is layered rather than displayed: textiles, ceramics, painted panels and originals hang alongside each other in rooms that change palette floor by floor. The theatre, the bowling alley lined with mid-century American fittings and the roof terrace with its beehives and vegetable beds all belong to the same instinct — fill the building with things worth looking at.
Guest rooms vary widely in shape, and the ones facing the courtyard get the quiet. It works well for a stay where the hotel is meant to be part of the itinerary rather than the base for one.
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Palazzo Margherita
Bernalda, Italy
Bernalda is a small town in Basilicata, inland from the Ionian coast, and the Palazzo Margherita is its nineteenth-century grand house — restored slowly and reopened as a hotel of a handful of suites. The restoration kept the frescoed ceilings, the tiled floors and the scale of the original rooms rather than subdividing them.
Each suite was decorated to a different reference, from Moorish tilework to cinema-inflected interiors, which means the building reads as a sequence of distinct rooms rather than a graded set of categories. A walled garden of citrus, palms and jasmine runs behind the house, and most of the day tends to migrate out into it.
The setting is rural and unhurried. Guests generally come for the region — the coastline, the archaeology, the food — and treat the palazzo as the still point of it.