Hotels built around a collection, a commission or a building worth looking at.
Hotel Éclat Beijing
Beijing, China
Hotel Éclat occupies part of Parkview Green, a glass-roofed complex in Beijing's Chaoyang district that behaves as much like a gallery as a building. Artworks are not confined to a lobby vitrine: sculpture and painting appear along the circulation routes, in the lifts and inside a number of the guest rooms, so the collection is encountered in passing rather than visited. Rooms lean toward bold colour and strong single gestures — a coloured bath, a large canvas, a piece of furniture treated as an object. The scale of the surrounding atrium keeps daylight in the public areas for most of the day, which suits a property that asks to be walked through slowly.
Gallery-scale public areas
Art in guest rooms
Central business district
COMO The Treasury Perth
Perth, Australia
This is a hotel made from restored nineteenth-century state buildings on Cathedral Square, and the restoration is the point. Corridors keep their proportions, windows keep their depth, and rooms are finished in a quiet, pale register that leaves the original fabric as the loudest element in the space. There are fewer rooms than the footprint suggests, because the plan was inherited rather than optimised. The result reads less like a themed heritage stay and more like a working building that was carefully handed over to a new use.
Restored state buildings
Small room count
Cathedral Square
Casa Cook Kos
Kos, Greece
Casa Cook Kos sits low and long near the water, built in plaster, timber and rattan with planting allowed to grow into the architecture. The design language is deliberately unfussy — daylight, shade, texture — and much of the plan is given over to outdoor rooms rather than interiors. Guests tend to move between pool, terrace and beach without any strong sense of crossing a threshold. It is a hotel whose visual identity comes from restraint and repetition rather than from any single dramatic feature.