Art Hotels

The Beaumont occupies a 1920s building on the edge of Brown Hart Gardens in Mayfair, a squat white block that began life as a garage and spent decades in other uses before it was converted into a hotel. The conversion kept the period bones — the stepped facade, the deep window reveals, the sense of a building designed when cars were still a novelty — and dressed the interiors in a restrained Art Deco register rather than a theatrical one.

What makes it an art hotel is bolted to the front of it. Antony Gormley's ROOM, a faceted figure in oxidised steel, stands against the facade at first-floor level and is not a sculpture you look at so much as one you can be inside: the interior of the piece is a windowless bedchamber attached to a conventional sitting room. Guests who book it sleep inside a work of art in the most literal sense available anywhere in the city.

Beyond the Gormley the building keeps a steady hand. Prints, photographs and period-appropriate commissions run through the corridors; the bar and the grill room downstairs read as rooms from the twenties without descending into pastiche. It is a small hotel by Mayfair standards, and the scale is part of the point.

Hotel Julien is deliberately hard to spot. Two adjoining historic townhouses on a narrow street in the centre of Antwerp were joined behind a plain door, and there is no sign worth the name. Inside, the house opens into a sequence of white rooms, a covered courtyard and a stair that climbs past works hung with a lot of wall left around them.

The art is contemporary and Belgian-leaning, changed often enough that returning guests notice. It is not treated as decoration: pieces are given the room they need, and the interiors — pale plaster, dark timber, long linen curtains — were clearly designed to stay quiet underneath. The building's older elements, beams and brickwork and an old fireplace or two, are left visible where they survived.

Upstairs there is a small spa and a roof terrace with the cathedral tower rising close enough to feel like part of the building. Breakfast is served in the courtyard. The whole place runs on the assumption that guests want to be left alone, and it is rather good at that.

The Widder is nine medieval townhouses in Zurich's old town, stitched together into one hotel by the architect Tilla Theus over a long and unusually careful restoration. The joins are not hidden. Glass bridges and steel stairs pass through stone walls; fragments of Gothic painting sit beside raw concrete; no two rooms share a floor plan, because no two houses did.

Its art programme runs on two tracks. One is the building's own recovered history — murals, ceilings and timberwork uncovered during the works and then left exposed rather than tidied away. The other is twentieth-century design and contemporary art brought in on top: furniture by names that belong in museums, and a collection of pieces hung through the public rooms and corridors.

A jazz bar occupies one of the ground-floor houses and is a genuine fixture of the city rather than a hotel amenity. The address is a lane in the oldest part of Zurich, a few minutes' walk from the river in one direction and the Bahnhofstrasse in the other.