Art Hotels

The founding idea was contrarian: a contemporary art museum that stays open around the clock, paid for by the hotel sitting on top of it. The structure is a run of nineteenth-century tobacco and bourbon warehouses on West Main Street, stitched into one property behind their original cast-iron facades. Where the loading bays once were, there are now galleries — free to enter, open far into the night, and unavoidable, because the lifts are on the other side of them.

Guest rooms are deliberately quiet: brick, high windows, plain palettes, good beds. They have to be, because the exhibitions rotate several times a year and the rooms cannot. The curatorial taste runs to the difficult rather than the decorative, and front-desk staff are briefed well enough to argue about the work with you. The red plastic penguins that migrate around the building are the house joke, and a fair signal of how the place handles its own seriousness.

This is the tightest curatorial brief in the category: the hotel is organised around the work of Georg Baselitz and makes no attempt to disguise it. Prints, drawings and canvases run through the lobby, the stair cores and the guest corridors, hung with enough air around them to be read rather than glanced at. The recurring inverted figures leave the building feeling gently off its axis, which is the point.

The site helps. The hotel stands on the Spree in Mitte, a short walk from Museum Island, pairing a plain modern block with a restored baroque house next door. Rooms are unfussy and generously glazed; the better ones face the water. Service runs at the brisk, unsentimental pace of a Berlin business hotel, without the hush that art usually imposes — the collection reads as part of the fabric, not as an amenity added for the brochure.

From the approach road the Dolder Grand looks like a nineteenth-century sanatorium that grew two curved arms, which is more or less what happened: the 1899 house was extended in the 2000s with a pair of crescents, and the seam between old and new is one of the more honest pieces of hotel architecture in Europe. Behind it sits a spa cut into the hillside, and below it the city and the lake.

The collection is the part guests do not expect. It is distributed through lounges, restaurants, lift lobbies and guest floors rather than corralled into a gallery, so you meet significant post-war and contemporary work on the way to breakfast. Reception keeps printed guides for anyone who wants to walk the building properly. In every other respect it behaves as a grand resort hotel should: large rooms, formal service, a kitchen taken very seriously indeed.

The Silo occupies the upper floors of a redundant grain elevator on the Cape Town waterfront, directly above the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, which fills the lower part of the same structure. Thomas Heatherwick's conversion carved a rounded volume out of the packed concrete tubes and glazed the openings with faceted windows that bulge outward, so the rooms read from inside as though set into something far heavier than a hotel.

The interiors answer the concrete with noise: saturated colour, deliberately mismatched furniture, contemporary African work hung throughout the guest floors and public rooms. With fewer than thirty rooms the place runs at the scale of a very large house, with a rooftop pool and a glass-walled lounge under the old machinery. The museum downstairs is a separate institution, but nobody stays here and treats them separately.