Art Hotels

The 21c model puts a free contemporary art museum on the ground floor of a working hotel, and Bentonville was the first property built from the ground up rather than fitted into an old warehouse. Exhibitions rotate; the galleries stay open around the clock, so guests coming back late walk through a show rather than a lobby. A green fibreglass flock of sculptural figures wanders the public rooms and gets moved about without warning. Rooms are deliberately quiet by comparison — pale, square, uncluttered — because the argument of the building happens outside the door.

Built for the 1992 Olympics and wrapped in an exposed steel exoskeleton, Hotel Arts holds one of the larger private contemporary collections in a European hotel — several hundred works by Spanish and Catalan artists, hung through corridors, landings and suites rather than corralled into a single gallery. The tower stands right at the waterfront in the Port Olímpic, beside Frank Gehry's copper fish. Guests are given a printed guide so the collection can be walked floor by floor, which turns a lift ride into something closer to a museum route.

A hillside resort above Zurich that reopened in 2008 after a Norman Foster intervention grafted two curved wings onto a 19th-century chalet-castle. The art programme is unusual for its scale and its confidence: more than a hundred works placed in circulation space, including large pieces by widely known contemporary names, chosen so that the historic and the new halves of the building read as one argument rather than two. The spa is carved into the hill, and the forest paths behind the hotel lead down into the city on foot.

A 15th-century villa in the vineyards outside Verona, restored and then handed to Alessandro Mendini, who painted its historic rooms in flat saturated colour and filled them with post-modern furniture. Frescoes survive on the ceilings while a lime-green console sits beneath them; the collision is the point. Contemporary works from the owner's holdings are hung throughout, and the gardens keep their formal Renaissance geometry. Few art hotels commit this hard to a single designer's hand across an entire protected building.