Art Hotels

The first of the 21c properties began with a pair of collectors who bought a row of nineteenth-century tobacco warehouses on West Main Street and decided the ground floor should belong to the public. It does. The contemporary art galleries downstairs stay open around the clock and cost nothing to walk through, which means the hotel is as much a neighbourhood fixture as a place to sleep.

Guest rooms sit above the exhibition floors and keep the warehouse bones visible — tall windows, exposed brick, wide plank floors — with the art programme spilling into corridors, stairwells and, famously, the restrooms. Rotating shows mean a return visit rarely looks like the last one.

A restaurant occupies the corner of the building and draws a local crowd independent of the hotel. Downtown Louisville's museum row and the Ohio River waterfront are both within an easy walk.

Named for the Australian painter John Olsen, this South Yarra hotel treats one artist's work as its organising idea rather than its decoration. Reproductions, prints and commissioned pieces appear throughout the public rooms, and the lobby doubles as a small gallery that changes over the year.

Rooms lean residential — many are studio or suite layouts with kitchenettes, built for guests staying a week rather than a night. A glass-bottomed pool cantilevered over the street is the building's party trick.

Chapel Street's shops and restaurants start at the door, and the tram into central Melbourne runs past the front of the building.

A fifteenth-century villa in the hills outside Verona, restored and then filled with a contemporary collection that argues cheerfully with the frescoes it hangs beside. The tension is the point: baroque plasterwork on one wall, a large-scale contemporary piece on the next.

Alessandro Mendini handled much of the interior, and his colour sense runs through the whole building — saturated, slightly theatrical, never quiet. No two rooms are decorated alike.

Formal gardens surround the villa, with vineyards beyond them. Verona's centre is a short drive; the Valpolicella wine country begins essentially at the gate.

Above Zurich on the Adlisberg, the Dolder Grand pairs an 1899 half-timbered curhaus with two modern wings added during Norman Foster's reworking of the building. What makes it belong in this section is the collection — well over a hundred works placed through the corridors, lounges and grounds, with pieces by names most guests will recognise.

The art is catalogued and guests can tour it; staff will walk you round if you ask. Sculpture continues outside into the parkland.

There is a large spa cut into the hillside, several restaurants, and a view down over the city and lake that the hotel has been selling since the nineteenth century.