Art Checks In

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Artful Lodgings

These days, the globe-trotting creative guest has a stunning variety of art-oriented hotels to choose from.

Damien Hirst Andy Warhol Pablo Picasso Tracey Emin James Turrell Robert Mapplethorpe Olaf Breuning Jenny Holzer

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In E. L. Konigsburg’s well-loved children’s book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, an 11-year-old girl and her younger brother run away from home to live among the masterpieces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Over the past 10 years or so, a new breed of luxury hotels has sprung up that allows guests to live a similar fantasy during their stays, eating, sleeping and socializing surrounded by pieces by blue-chip artists.

These ventures, most of which focus on contemporary work, represent an effort by hoteliers to distinguish themselves by capitalizing on the art world’s growing glamour and globalization. With collectors hopping from fairs to biennials to museum openings, it’s no surprise that the hospitality industry has rushed to accommodate both those actually traveling with art’s movable feast and also, perhaps even more profitably in the long term, aspirants to that lifestyle. Mixing luxury with top-tier culture benefits not only the hotels’ owners, whose niche properties have garnered high occupancy rates and increased media coverage, but also the artists whose work appears in them.

Art provides hotels with a new way of branding themselves, says Joan Warren-Grady, a San Diego-based art adviser, who adds that the displays also create a strong "visual memory" for guests, making them more likely to return and to pass the word on to others. Warren-Grady, who has built collections for more than 200 luxury hotels, including the Four Seasons in Miami and San Francisco, notes that one reason her clients began to accumulate museum-quality art in the early 1990s was the revenue generated by their sales of condo-hotels.

But if this additional discretionary income helped hotels put the works on their walls, their shift of focus from decoration to capital-"A" art was part of a broader new approach to luxury — and to creating an aspirational environment for a sophisticated guest. "It used to be about innovating in the rooms, making them more comfortable with things like higher-thread-count sheets," says Jonah Disend, who runs the New York-based branding consultancy Redscout. "But then it started to move to the entire hotel."

Another factor is the rise of entrepreneurial collectors, who have employed hotels as showcases for their holdings and to enhance the existing cultural offerings in their communities. In Miami, a town filled with properties competing for the same clientele, the local arts patrons Christine "Cricket" Taplin and her husband, Marty, a real estate developer, have turned the historic Sagamore hotel, in South Beach, into a destination for culture vultures. The couple bought the property in 1997, renovated it and then, in 2001, inspired by the upcoming Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB) fair, filled it with pieces from their prodigious contemporary-art collection. Every year since, before visitors arrive for ABMB in December, Cricket, who acts as the Sagamore’s curator, changes its display of videos, painting, sculpture and photographs by such international artists as Spencer Tunick and Massimo Vitali and by local talents like the Cuban-born painter José Bedia.

The hotel’s installation program was immediately gratifying, says Taplin, because "it made art accessible to everybody. It opened doors for people who were maybe intimidated or confused about how to get started collecting. I think we’ve made our mark that way." The Taplins have also commissioned a number of works, including Roxy Paine’s hyperrealistic mushroom sculptures, installed in 2001, which appear to grow from a wall over the front desk, and a temporary monumental sand sculpture of a reclining female figure on the hotel’s beachfront that the Swiss artist Olaf Breuning created last December.

In 2006, about a year after the Walker Art Center reopened in Minneapolis with a gleaming new building by Herzog & de Meuron, the local arts patron and real estate magnate Ralph Burnet, who had served as the museum’s board chairman in the 1990s, launched the 60-room Chambers hotel, a sibling of the New York establishment of the same name (but with a different owner). Burnet, who calls the venture his "mini Walker," filled it with 200 items from his 700-work collection, which focuses on YBAs, such as Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Gary Hume. Video pieces, including some by William Wegman, play on monitors throughout the hotel, and guests can also view them on televisions in their rooms, each of which contains original artworks.