Art Hotels

Hotel des Arts occupies an older downtown building a short walk from the shopping streets, and its idea is unusually literal: individual guest rooms were given over to individual artists, who painted them floor to ceiling. There is no house style holding the rooms together. One is dense and graphic, the next is soft and figurative, and the corridor between them belongs to somebody else again.

That makes booking here a slightly different exercise than usual. Guests tend to look at rooms rather than at categories, and the hotel's own material leans into that, describing what is on the walls as readily as what is in them. The rooms themselves are modest in the ordinary sense — compact, plainly furnished, with the kind of bathroom you expect in a converted early-twentieth-century block.

Service is small-scale and informal, closer to a guesthouse than to a chain. The ground floor has been used for exhibitions and events at various points in the hotel's life, which keeps a certain amount of traffic moving through the lobby that is not made up of people with suitcases. If you want a hotel that disappears into the background, this is the wrong one.

Gladstone House is a red-brick Victorian hotel on Queen Street West that spent a long stretch of its recent history as one of the city's most active art venues, with rooms designed individually by local artists and designers and a ground floor that functioned as a gallery, bar and stage more or less at once.

A renovation some years ago pulled the interiors toward a calmer, more contemporary register, and the artist-room programme now sits alongside a rotating exhibition schedule rather than carrying the whole building on its own. The bones are unchanged: high ceilings, a hand-operated lift that staff still talk about, thick masonry that keeps the street noise where it belongs.

What survives most clearly is the hotel's position in its neighbourhood. It is the kind of place where locals turn up for a drink or a talk without booking a room, and where the lobby on a Friday evening is busier than the front desk. Guests should expect that, and some will choose it precisely for it.

Christian Lacroix designed the interiors of this small hotel on a side street in the seventh arrondissement, and the result is an argument about pattern. Walls carry printed scenes; ceilings are not left alone; colours that would fight anywhere else are put deliberately next to each other and asked to hold.

The building is narrow and the room count is low, which suits the approach — a scheme this insistent would exhaust a two-hundred-room property. Instead each floor reads as a variation, and guests returning to the hotel often ask for a different room than last time. Breakfast is served downstairs in a room that continues the theme rather than offering relief from it.

Practically, it is a quiet address. The museums are close, the street is residential, and the hotel does not have a restaurant or a bar competing for the ground floor. Staff are used to guests who came for the design and are happy to explain what they are looking at.

Karim Rashid drew nhow Berlin inside and out, and the building on the Spree does not attempt subtlety: a cantilevered upper volume juts over the water, and the interior runs on curves, gloss and a pink-and-lilac palette applied at full strength across public floors and guest rooms alike.

The hotel is also a working music property, with recording studios on site and instruments available to guests, which gives it a purpose beyond the surface. That combination — a strongly authored interior plus an actual production function — is rarer than it sounds, and it means the building is used at odd hours by people who are not tourists.

Rooms are large by central-European standards, with river views on the better side and the designer's furniture vocabulary carried through to the desk and the lighting. It is a hotel that will not suit everyone; it does not pretend otherwise, and it is comfortable being the loudest thing on its stretch of the riverbank.