Art Hotels

The ground floor is a free, genuinely public museum that keeps long hours, and that single decision changes the character of everything above it. People walk in off Main Street who have no intention of staying the night, which means the hotel's circulation spaces behave less like a lobby and more like a civic building — busier, louder in the early evening, and considerably more interesting to sit in than the average hotel lounge.

Rooms are large, plainly finished and deliberately calmer than the exhibition floors, with exposed brick and heavy timber left over from the warehouses. The restraint is the point: after an afternoon among video installations and rotating group shows, the bedroom is where the building stops talking. Service is unusually informal for a hotel of this standard, and the staff tend to know what is currently hanging downstairs well enough to have opinions about it.

It suits travellers who want the art programme to be a reason for the trip rather than a bonus, and anyone who likes a hotel that is embedded in its city rather than sealed off from it. Exhibitions change through the year, so the building you visit in spring is not quite the building you visit in autumn — worth checking the current programme before you commit to dates.

Philippe Starck's reinvention left the bones of the old hotel intact and then filled them with theatre: draped fabrics, mirrors angled where you do not expect them, guitars left in the rooms, and a wilful refusal to make any two spaces feel like a matched set. It is a hotel that would rather be memorable than tasteful, and it commits to that fully enough that the result reads as coherent rather than chaotic.

The art is not confined to the walls. There is a dedicated gallery, an art bookshop, and a resident art concierge whose job is to get guests into the city's exhibitions and studios — a service that sounds like marketing and turns out, in practice, to be the most useful thing the hotel offers. Bedrooms are generous by central Paris standards, with the softness and sound insulation you would expect at this level, and the spa beneath the building is one of the quietest rooms in the eighth arrondissement.

Off the Champs-Élysées, it is well placed for the museum end of a Paris trip and slightly stranded from the neighbourhoods where Parisians actually eat. Come for the design and the art access; do not come expecting a discreet, beige, invisible sort of luxury, because that is precisely what this hotel set out to stop being.

The original 1899 building still looks like the alpine curhaus it was, and the newer wings by Foster + Partners curve away from it without pretending to match. That contrast sets up the collection, which runs through corridors, landings and restaurants rather than being penned into a gallery — Warhol near the lifts, contemporary sculpture on the terraces, work you have to walk past on the way to breakfast whether you planned to look at it or not.

As a hotel it is a resort first: a very large spa cut into the hillside, two restaurants operating at different levels of formality, and rooms that lean into comfort rather than statement design. The view down over the lake and the city does a great deal of the work, and the funicular connection into town means you can treat it as a mountain retreat and a city hotel in the same day.

It rewards a slower stay. Guests who arrive late and leave early will see a well-run luxury hotel and miss the collection almost entirely; those who take the guided art walk or simply wander the older wing on a wet afternoon get something closer to a private museum with a swimming pool attached.

Each hotel in the Art Series group takes a single living or recently living Australian artist as its subject, and this one belongs to Adam Cullen — raw, figurative, frequently uncomfortable work that is a genuinely odd choice for a hospitality interior and all the better for it. Reproductions and originals appear at scale in the lobby, the corridors and above the beds, so the building never lets you forget whose hotel it is.

Underneath the theme it is a straightforward, well-run city hotel: compact studios through to larger suites with kitchenettes, a bar and dining room busy with locals, and a position on Commercial Road that puts Chapel Street's shops and restaurants within a short walk and the city centre a tram ride away. Longer stays are common, and the apartment-style rooms are set up for them.

The trade-off is honest. If you want art as soothing wallpaper, this is the wrong building — Cullen's work is confrontational and it is hanging where you sleep. If you want a hotel with an actual point of view about a specific artist, at a price that does not require the trip to be a special occasion, it is one of the more convincing versions of the idea anywhere.