Art Hotels

Frank Gehry's ribbons of pink, gold and silver titanium sit on top of a nineteenth-century winery estate in Rioja Alavesa, and the first thing worth saying about the building is that it is a hotel and behaves like one. There are a few dozen rooms across two linked volumes, a spa, two restaurants, and a service culture inherited from the wine business that surrounds it. The sculpture is real, but so is the housekeeping.

Inside, the drama is rationed. Rooms are calm, largely neutral, and angled so that the titanium canopy frames a slice of vineyard rather than competing with it; several have walls that lean in ways no rectangle would allow, which guests tend to find either delightful or disorienting. The art argument here is architectural rather than curatorial — the collection is the building, plus the cellars underneath it, and a stay is mostly an exercise in living inside a much-photographed object without the photography getting in the way.

Few hotels have made a stranger bet than this one: hand each guest floor to a different architect or designer, give them a free hand, and let the lifts do the curating. The result is a twelve-storey hotel on Avenida de América in which the corridor you step into on the fourth floor bears almost no relationship to the one three storeys up — different materials, different lighting logic, sometimes a different idea of what a bathroom is for.

What keeps it a hotel rather than an exhibition is the ordinary machinery running underneath. Reception, breakfast, meeting rooms and airport-adjacent convenience all work the way a large city hotel's should, and guests are quietly encouraged to ride up and look around. Some floors have aged more gracefully than others, which is the honest cost of commissioning boldly and committing for decades; the building is best understood as a record of a particular moment in design thinking, still in daily service.

Faena treats the whole block as a stage set and the hotel as its most heavily used room. The oceanfront building keeps its 1940s bones while the interiors run to deep reds, gilding and theatrical corridors, and the art is not incidental — large commissioned works anchor the garden and the public spaces, with a nearby theatre and arts venue extending the programme past the property line.

As a place to sleep, it is more conventional than the photographs suggest. Rooms face the Atlantic, come with the butler-style service the house calls its own, and are finished in a warmer, quieter register than the lobby. The pleasure of staying is the swing between the two: an intensely styled ground floor that expects you to arrive dressed for it, and an upstairs that simply wants to be a good beach hotel with the sea in the window.

A grand hotel near the Arc de Triomphe that was reopened with an unusual brief: keep the Parisian palace format, but make contemporary art part of the operating model rather than the decoration budget. Philippe Starck's refit left the public rooms deliberately unfinished-looking in places, with canvases leaning rather than hung, and the hotel maintains a bookshop, a screening room and an art concierge whose job is to get guests into the city's galleries.

Behind that, it runs as a full-service luxury hotel of the traditional kind — long corridors, a serious spa, restaurants that draw Parisians as well as guests, and rooms that lean soft and residential with guitars and record players turning up more often than minibars deserve. The collection changes; the service does not. It is the rare art hotel where the programme would survive even if every picture were taken down tomorrow.