Category · 3 entries

Art Hotels

Hotels where the building, the collection or the design brief is the reason to stay.

The Robey

Chicago, United States

The Robey occupies the Northwest Tower, a wedge of 1920s art deco that has stood at the six-corner junction of Milwaukee, North and Damen since Wicker Park was a working neighbourhood rather than a destination. The building narrows as it rises, which means the floor plates narrow too, and the rooms inherit that geometry: angled corners, deep window reveals, ceilings that feel taller than the room is wide.

The conversion left the period bones legible instead of smoothing them away. Terrazzo, dark timber and blackened metal carry through the public rooms, and the upper floors open onto terraces that look straight down the diagonal of Milwaukee Avenue. It is a hotel for people who want the architecture to be the first thing they notice.

Art deco tower
Wicker Park
Rooftop terraces
Converted 1929 building

Wythe Hotel

Brooklyn, United States

Wythe Hotel sits on the Williamsburg waterfront in a brick factory that spent its first century making barrels. The renovation kept the shell and most of what was inside it — pine beams reclaimed from the original floors, cast-iron columns, brick left bare — and added a steel-and-glass storey on top rather than pretending the building had always been a hotel.

Rooms face two ways, and the difference matters. The west side looks across the East River at the Manhattan skyline through windows that run nearly the full wall; the east side looks back into Brooklyn and is quieter for it. Custom wallpaper, concrete ceilings and locally made furniture keep the interiors closer to a workshop than a suite.

1901 cooperage
Reclaimed pine
Skyline-facing rooms
Williamsburg waterfront

Nolinski Paris

Paris, France

Nolinski Paris stands a short walk from the Palais-Royal, on the stretch of the Avenue de l'Opéra where the city's nineteenth-century planning is at its most deliberate. The interiors answer that formality with something warmer and more eclectic: layered textiles, deep colour, lacquer and marble arranged in rooms that read as a private apartment assembled over decades rather than a hotel fitted out at once.

The ground floor is organised around salons — a library, a bar, a restaurant — that flow into one another, and the spa occupies the level below. The scale throughout is domestic. There are relatively few rooms for a property in this location, and the building is used accordingly.

Near the Palais-Royal
Salon-style ground floor
Designer interiors
Subterranean spa