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Art Hotels

Art gets used loosely in hotel marketing. The three properties below earn the label differently: one holds a collection large enough to need its own curator, one treats vernacular building technique as the artwork, and one puts sculpture-like villas over water. None of them hangs prints in a corridor and calls it a gallery.

Hotels in this category

01

Rosewood Hong Kong

Hong Kong

Rosewood Hong Kong occupies the upper floors of a tower on Victoria Dockside, the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront block that was redeveloped as a cultural district. The harbour does a lot of the work: rooms face Hong Kong Island across the water, and the view changes character three or four times between breakfast and the evening light show.

What puts it in this category is the collection. Art was commissioned and acquired for the building rather than bought to fill wall space afterwards, and it runs from the arrival hall through the stairwells into the guest floors. Interiors by Tony Chi were built around it — a vertical house rather than a lobby-and-corridors hotel, with living-room proportions on the public floors.

Restaurants, a spa across several floors and a pool terrace sit inside the same tower. Guests who never leave the building still pass a dozen commissioned works on the way to dinner, which is roughly the point.

  • Hong Kong
  • Victoria Dockside
  • Opened 2019
  • Harbourfront
02

Amankora

Bhutan

Amankora is not one hotel. It is five small lodges spread across the valleys of western and central Bhutan, designed to be travelled as a circuit — a few nights in each, with the drive between them treated as part of the stay rather than an interruption.

The craft is the draw. Each lodge borrows from dzong architecture: thick rammed-earth walls, timber framing, narrow windows placed to frame one thing at a time. Rooms are plain in the way a good workshop is plain — a bukhari stove, a wooden bathtub, very little else competing for attention.

Setting differs sharply between the five. One sits in a pine forest above a ruined fortress, another in farmland beside a river, another on the edge of a wide glacial valley known for its wintering cranes. Travelling the full circuit means watching the same architectural language answer five different landscapes.

  • Bhutan
  • Five lodges
  • Rammed earth
  • Valley circuit
03

Nayara Bocas del Toro

Panama

You arrive by boat. Nayara Bocas del Toro sits in the Bocas del Toro archipelago on Panama's Caribbean side, on a private island reached across a short stretch of protected water, with villas raised on stilts above the shallows.

Design here is sculptural rather than decorative. The villas are shaped forms — curved roofs, timber and thatch, open sides — positioned so that each one faces water without facing its neighbour. Walkways rather than corridors connect them.

The surrounding mangrove forest is under restoration, and the hotel's construction was organised around leaving it intact. Sloths, frogs and a large amount of birdlife are the practical result. Snorkelling starts at the bottom of the villa stairs, which removes most of the excuses.

  • Panama
  • Overwater villas
  • Mangrove reserve
  • Arrival by boat

Entries are updated when the buildings change, not when the calendar does.