Art Hotels

A hotel that has been taking in guests for roughly six centuries, and which now hangs contemporary art in the vaults it inherited.

The Blaue Gans occupies a run of medieval buildings on the Getreidegasse, the narrow shopping street that carries most of Salzburg’s foot traffic. Its walls are thick, whitewashed and irregular; doorways duck, corridors bend, and the vaulted ceilings on the lower floors are the original ones. What the current owners added was not another layer of period furniture but a working collection of contemporary work — video pieces, photography, sculpture — installed where the building will take it.

That decision shapes the stay more than it sounds. Because the art is placed in corridors, stairwells and the restaurant rather than corralled into a gallery room, guests meet it on the way to breakfast. Rooms themselves are deliberately calm: pale walls, good linen, oak, and windows that look either onto the street below or back at the cliff face of the Mönchsberg.

As a hotel it is small enough that reception knows who has come back, and central enough that the festival halls, the cathedral and the funicular are all short walks. The restaurant leans Austrian and unfussy. It suits travellers who want a serious old building and a modern eye in it, without a theme being pressed on them.

The former home of a national newspaper, still full of people at work — designers and makers downstairs, guests upstairs.

Before it was a hotel, this concrete slab on the Wibautstraat printed de Volkskrant. The conversion kept the building’s bones and its industrial temper rather than smoothing them away: exposed ceilings, heavy doors, wide unglamorous corridors that still read as offices.

Accommodation is tiered on purpose. Standard rooms are compact, well made and quiet. Above them sit a set of one-off rooms, each handed to a different designer, artist or collective and built out to their idea — one might be a bathtub in the middle of the floor, another a nest of plywood, another almost bare. Guests choose the register they want rather than being sold a single house style.

The lower floors are rented to creative studios, so the hotel has a working population that does not check out. On the roof there are hot tubs and a sauna with a view over east Amsterdam; in the basement a club runs late. It is not a hotel for someone who needs hush, and it does not pretend otherwise.

A nineteenth-century Augustinian convent reworked by the architect Vincent Van Duysen into a hotel of deliberate restraint.

August sits in the Green Quarter, a former military hospital site on the edge of central Antwerp. The complex is a set of brick pavilions around gardens, with a chapel at its heart. Van Duysen’s intervention was to leave the monastic geometry intact and to strip everything else back to plaster, dark timber, stone and linen.

The result is an art hotel in the older sense: the composition is the artwork. Light moves along the corridors during the day and is the main event; furniture is spare and low; the palette barely shifts between the lobby and the guest rooms. The chapel is now the bar, its height and arched windows left alone, filled in the evenings instead of being lit theatrically.

Rooms vary because the original building varied — some in the historic pavilions with tall windows onto the garden, others in the newer volume. A stay here is quiet and slow by design, and the pleasure of it is architectural rather than decorative.

A 1930s telecommunications building near Les Invalides, now a hotel where the collection runs through the corridors as well as the rooms.

Rue Louis Codet is a quiet address in the seventh arrondissement, a few minutes from Les Invalides and the Rodin garden. The hotel was built into an Art Deco block once owned by the French telephone administration, and the conversion kept its stripped façade and its generous floor plates.

Inside, contemporary works — paintings, prints, photographs, the occasional sculpture — are hung along the passages and inside the bedrooms, so the building reads as one continuous hang rather than a lobby display. Rooms are larger than Paris normally allows at this scale, many with terraces or balconies, and the material palette is warm: grey stone, brushed metal, dark wood, deep upholstery.

At the centre is a glazed courtyard planted heavily enough to feel like a garden room, used for breakfast and for the rest of the day by people who have no intention of leaving. Service is closer to a private house than a grand hotel, which is the point of it.