Art Hotels

Art hotels are easy to claim and harder to earn. The properties gathered here have a genuine relationship with the work on their walls — a restored landmark, a commissioned interior, a collection assembled over decades rather than bought by the metre. Each entry explains what that relationship actually is.

Detroit, United States

The Siren Hotel

The Siren occupies the Wurlitzer Building, a narrow 1926 tower on Broadway that spent years empty and visibly failing before it was brought back. The restoration did not smooth the building out. Terracotta detailing, the tight floorplate and the original vertical proportions all survived, and the interiors were designed to sit inside that oddity rather than hide it.

Rooms are furnished in a deliberately theatrical register — saturated colour, patterned textiles, vintage pieces chosen one at a time. Sizes vary a good deal because the floorplate is small and no two levels divide up the same way. The ground floor and mezzanine carry a bar, a café and a small performance room, which keeps the building busy with people who are not staying the night.

• 1926 Wurlitzer Building
• Broadway, downtown Detroit
• Bar, café and event space on site
• Rooms vary widely in size

Brooklyn, United States

The Hoxton, Williamsburg

This is the group's Brooklyn address, a purpose-built block on Wythe Avenue with a rooftop that faces the Manhattan skyline across the East River. Being new construction rather than a conversion gave the designers room to work, and the result reads more like a mid-century apartment building than a hotel — warm woods, mixed textiles, a lot of commissioned and sourced artwork in the corridors and lounges.

The lobby is run as a working room: long tables, sofas, people with laptops, and a bar that gradually takes over as the evening goes on. Bedrooms come in a small set of sizes and are compact by design, with the floor-to-ceiling glazing doing most of the work. There is a restaurant at ground level and a second one on the roof.

• Purpose-built, not a conversion
• Rooftop restaurant with skyline views
• Lobby doubles as a workspace
• Compact rooms, full-height windows

Palermo, Italy

Villa Igiea

Villa Igiea sits on a rocky point at the edge of Palermo's harbour, looking back at the city and out at Monte Pellegrino. The building began as a private villa and was reworked at the turn of the twentieth century by Ernesto Basile into one of the defining works of Sicilian Art Nouveau. Its most famous room, the Sala Basile, keeps the original Ettore De Maria Bergler murals — pale, elongated figures among flowering branches.

Terraced gardens step down toward the water past palms, citrus and the remains of an older folly. Bedrooms are large and quiet, decorated with restraint so the public rooms keep the drama for themselves. A long recent restoration reopened the building without flattening any of it.

• Ernesto Basile, early 1900s
• Sala Basile murals intact
• Terraced gardens to the waterfront
• Sicilian Art Nouveau landmark