ART

Art Hotels

Three hotels where the art is not decoration bolted onto a finished building. In each case the collection, the architecture or the restoration is the reason the address is worth the detour.

TLV

The Norman Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv, Israel

The Norman occupies two restored 1920s buildings a few streets back from Rothschild Boulevard, in the part of Tel Aviv where Bauhaus-era apartment blocks still set the roofline. The restoration kept the original proportions — high ceilings, deep window reveals, the narrow stairwells that come with a building of that age — and the art was hung to suit those rooms rather than the other way round.

The collection leans heavily Israeli and contemporary, with works placed through the corridors and landings as much as in the public rooms, so guests meet most of it on the way to somewhere else. A rooftop pool sits above the whole thing, and the restaurant downstairs opens onto a courtyard garden that is noticeably quieter than the street outside.

Room counts are small by city-hotel standards, which is the practical consequence of working inside two old residential shells instead of building new. It suits travellers who want the art and the address more than the square metreage.

Two restored 1920s buildings · Israeli contemporary collection · Rooftop pool · Courtyard restaurant

PAR

Hotel Sezz Paris

Paris, France

Hotel Sezz sits in the 16th arrondissement, a short walk from the Trocadéro and the river, in a Haussmann-era building whose interior was stripped back and reworked by designer Christophe Pillet. The result reads far more late-modern than the façade suggests: dark stone, raw-looking wall surfaces, and furniture that treats each room as a single designed object rather than a set of decorated corners.

Colour is used sparingly and deliberately — flashes of strong tone against grey and black — and the bathrooms are frequently left open to the room, which is either the appeal or the deal-breaker depending on the traveller. There is a small bar known for champagne, and the hotel runs on a personal-assistant model rather than a conventional front desk.

It is a quiet part of Paris, residential in the evenings, and the hotel does not try to compensate for that with a busy lobby. Guests who want noise walk to it.

Design by Christophe Pillet · 16th arrondissement · Open-plan bathrooms · Champagne bar

SJD

Hotel Todos Santos

Baja California Sur, Mexico

Todos Santos is a small town on the Pacific side of the Baja peninsula, an hour or so north of Los Cabos, and it has drawn artists and gallerists for long enough that the hotel does not have to invent a context for itself. The building works in adobe, lime plaster and local stone, with thick walls doing the cooling that air conditioning does elsewhere.

Rooms open onto courtyards and shaded walkways rather than interior corridors, and the art throughout is regional — ceramics, textiles, paintings by people who live within driving distance. The palette outside is desert and the palette inside answers it directly.

The Pacific here is rough and not a swimming beach for most of the year, so the hotel's pool and garden do that work instead. Surfers go elsewhere along the coast and come back for dinner.

Adobe and local stone · Regional artists and makers · Courtyard layout · Pacific Baja town