In London, hotels are where the art is – The Art Newspaper

The number of new luxury hotels in London keeps growing—and the opening of the Rosewood Chancery in September in Grosvenor Square, in the former US Embassy, completed by the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen in 1960, is causing the biggest buzz. With its architecture brought back to life by David Chipperfield and interiors by the chic Parisian firm Joseph Dirand, it has added 144 suites to London’s capacity. Overall, 757 five-star-plus rooms are expected to be unveiled this year alone.

It will not have escaped visitors to the capital that in these hallowed interiors art is now everywhere, a message of cultural superiority and elegant elevation. Claridge’s set a high bar in October 2023 when it unveiled a new penthouse featuring 75 works by (and on loan from) Damien Hirst—not just his easy-to-live-with studies of cherry blossoms, but testing pieces such as a miniature of Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain (2006), his sculpture of the flayed martyr, which stands on a coffee table, the better to contemplate as you drink your morning tea.

A month later, Broadwick Soho opened, featuring 30 or so works from the collection of its owner, Noel Hayden, a tech entrepreneur. Apart from the impressive set of Francis Bacon lithographs in the penthouse, there are a further 300 or so works bought or specially commissioned for the hotel. Follow the signs to the bathrooms from its rooftop bar, for example, and you will pass Large Idol No 2 (1985), a towering totemic bronze by William Turnbull that once belonged to David Bowie. “We always knew we wanted something really significant and unexpected that people will interact with, even if they have no idea what it is,” says Joshua Gardner, the hotel’s executive director. “I hate to say it, but these days you need something for Instagram.”

When it opens next year, Auberge Resorts Collection’s forthcoming reinvention of Cambridge House on Piccadilly (once the premises of the In and Out Naval and Military Club) is promising its guests a Picasso self-portrait and a Magritte.

But using art to signal the status of a hotel is nothing new. In 1952, The Dorchester gave over one of its suites to the British artist and stage designer Oliver Messel to create what it hoped would be the most luxurious hotel accommodation in London, furnished to his specifications and hung with his paintings. Time was not kind to Messel’s extravaganza, but now, 73 years on, the artworks and decorations have been meticulously restored over a two-year period and the rooms are almost exactly as Messel envisaged them, an essay in riotous cod rococo, swagged chintz, contorted gilt and clashing colours.

The Dorchester’s owner at the time, Robert McAlpine, first encountered Messel’s work at a performance by the Royal Ballet of The Sleeping Beauty, for which he had designed the sets. McAlpine was bowled over by the fabulous staging (still in use at Covent Garden), which was intended to conjure a palace and a forest. Hoping to recreate a little of its magic in his own domain, he asked Messel to design him a suite.

The initial brief was for “a luxury apartment” that Messel himself would want to live in. No budget was agreed upon. As Messel’s biographer, Charles Castle, noted: “This may have been an uncharacteristic error of judgement, for Oliver exceeded expectations of expenditure by a large margin.” (Its £25 a night rate, exorbitant in the 1950s, did little to claw back the overspend. Its new rate will be £15,000 a night when it opens in mid-November.)

As soon as the suite was finished, the photographer Norman Parkinson was hired to record the results. His images, along with records from the hotel’s archive and the model Messel made (which is now in the Victoria & Albert Museum), enabled the London-based conservation practice Hare & Humphreys to recreate his scheme. He had specified silk wall coverings by the British firm Sekers, which had been replaced in 1981 with Fortuny fabrics. Fortunately, Sekers was able to reprint the original designs.

But many of the suite’s decorations were made by Messel himself, from the wall and door paintings to those that flank the fireplace in frames of his own design. He also painted the mural on the ceiling of the vaulted anteroom to the drawing room, with roses evocative of the Garland Dance in Sleeping Beauty. Long since painted over, his vision has now been revealed once again.

With its burgundy fitted carpet and imperial yellow walls, the scheme is as startling today as it was when new—even Noël Coward expressed doubts about the “highly coloured decor”. In a letter dated June 1957, he wrote: “I am home in England again, installed in the somewhat excessive luxe of the Oliver Messel Suite. All terribly exotic, but it is not me.”

Twenty years later, however, the comedian Barry Humphries’s alter ego Dame Edna Everage declared the suite to be “gorgeous… a second home to me”. When, in 1979, she was the subject of a TV mockumentary (La Dame aux Gladiolas: the Agony and the Ecstasy of Dame Edna Everage—you can find it on YouTube), the Messel Suite was chosen for the location.

McAlpine was so charmed by the suite’s theatricality that he commissioned Messel to design more rooms on the floor above. The walls of the Penthouse and the Pavilion Suite are decorated with branches mounted on mirrors to evoke the tangled briars that grew up around Princess Aurora’s castle. There are lamp fittings like birdcages, a tented ceiling, painted silk walls and an abundance of cherubs and shells. The suite will be restored next year. Some of us can hardly wait.

Where the art is

Le Bristol, Paris

To celebrate the centenary of its opening this year, Le Bristol, perhaps the loveliest of Paris’s palace hotels, unveiled its new Imperial Suite this summer, a 320 sq. m, lavishly decorated apartment hung with art by George Condo, a longtime habitué of the hotel. Condo has made two paintings—a spirited multi-portrait Cubist affair and a heavily outlined woman—as well as eight black-and-white drawings of parts of the hotel. Though less of a regular now, Le Bristol was once Condo’s bolthole in the city, so it made sense to consult him about how the premium suite should be decorated. The result is a set of rooms intended to evoke the home of a collector with a fondness for Condo’s work, down to a solid-gold door handle in the form of his recurring Uncle Joe’s Head motif.

MACAM Hotel, Lisbon

Also new this year is the MACAM Hotel in Lisbon, which shares the 18th-century Palácio Condes da Ribeira Grande with the Museu de Arte Contempoânea Armando Martins. The museum displays works from a collection of more than 600 works amassed by the Portuguese real estate and hospitality tycoon and is one of the best private contemporary art collections in Portugal. It includes works by renowned international names—Marina Abramović, John Baldessari, Olafur Eliasson, Vik Muniz, Ernesto Neto, Albert Oehlen—alongside Martins’s exceptional collection of less-well-known Portuguese Modernists, particularly the work of Eduardo Viana. There are site-specific works by Carlos Aires and José Pedro Croft and, on the western terrace, Canadian sculptor Angela Bulloch’s Heavy Metal Stack of Five, Yellow 80 (2024), a four-metre-high tower of five irregular geometric shapes, each facet painted blue, yellow or white to create an optical illusion.

Hamilton Princess, Bermuda

When Peter Green and his sons Alexander and Andrew bought what is now the Fairmont Hamilton Princess in Bermuda in 2012, they not only moved in a museum-quality assemblage of works by the likes of Matisse, Magritte, Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, but also works by contemporary artists including Ai Weiwei, Banksy, David Hockney, KAWS, Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Bridget Riley and Yashimoto Nara. A site-specific commission by Julian Opie for its marina, a 13m-long mural made of bronze inlaid into limestone titled Beach Walkers (2018), is now something of a landmark for yachts heading for its dock.

Faena Miami Beach

Just about visible from the beach, Damien Hirst’s Gone but Not Forgotten (2014), a 24-carat-gold-plated 10,000-year-old mammoth skeleton housed in a glass vitrine, may be the most Instagrammed image of the Miami Modern palace formerly known as The Saxony, and since 2015 as the Faena Miami Beach. A collaboration between the collector-philanthropists Alan Faena and Len Blavatnik, the whole hotel is filled with art and its rooms were designed by the film director Baz Luhrmann. But it may well be that the monumental gold-flecked murals and mosaic floors in its lobby by the Argentine artist Juan Gatti will be the feature that outlives everything else.

Aman Venice

Built around 1570, what is now the Palazzo Papadopoli—better known as Aman Venice—used to be called the Palazzo Tiepolo. It was acquired by a relative of the great Venetian Rococo painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo in 1748, who invited the artist to paint the ceiling of the alcove in what is now its 103 sq. m Alcova Tiepolo Suite (its Chinoiserie murals remain unattributed). The rest of the decor is a fairly sober scheme by Christian Liaigre, though two carnival scenes in its games room—also beautifully restored—are the work of Giovanni Battista’s son, Giovanni Domenico.

L’Arlatan, Arles

When Maja Hoffmann, the visionary behind the Luma Foundation in Arles, acquired a 15th-century hôtel particulier in the city and decided to turn it into an actual hotel, her first call was to the Cuban-born American artist Jorge Pardo. Hoffmann offered him carte blanche to reinvent its interior as a Gesamtkunstwerk, and Pardo duly designed every detail, from the key cards to the furniture to the 400 light fittings, turning it into the brilliantly coloured L’Arlatan. But the pièces de resistance are the ceramic tiles: 11 different geometric shapes in 18 colours that tessellate into a pattern that never repeats itself over almost 6,000 sq. m, covering the entire floor of all three storeys, as well as the bathrooms and the walls of the swimming pool.