Art Hotels

Tresanton began life as a club for yachtsmen and still behaves a little like one. The hotel occupies a run of houses stacked into the hillside above St Mawes harbour, connected by short flights of steps and open terraces, so moving between the bar, the dining room and a bedroom means going outside and looking at the water whether you meant to or not.

The interiors are the reason it sits in this section. Rather than a single decorative scheme applied wholesale, the rooms were assembled over time from paintings, ceramics, mosaic floors and furniture chosen individually, and the result reads as a house that has been lived in and added to rather than specified. No two bedrooms match, and several are shaped by the awkward geometry of the original buildings.

It is a small hotel in a small town, which sets the tone for everything else: a short menu, a boat, a cinema room, and long gaps in the day when nothing in particular is scheduled.

Casa Malca is a beachfront property on the Tulum coast that is best understood as a private collection which happens to have bedrooms attached. The owner is an art dealer, and the works are hung throughout the public rooms, the corridors and the grounds rather than confined to a gallery space — you meet them on the way to breakfast.

The building has a complicated past and does not hide it. Concrete volumes open straight onto sand on one side and back into dense coastal vegetation on the other, and the renovation left much of the original structure legible instead of smoothing it away. Pieces are rotated, so the hotel is not quite the same from one season to the next.

Rooms divide between those facing the water and those set back among the trees, and the difference is more than a view: the sound, the light and the temperature all change as you move inland by thirty metres.

Palazzo Daniele occupies a nineteenth-century family residence in the far south of Puglia, and the restoration took an unusual line: almost nothing was added. Frescoed ceilings, stone floors and vast empty volumes were cleaned and left as they were, with contemporary furniture placed sparingly into rooms that could easily have absorbed ten times as much.

Into that emptiness the owners have introduced site-specific works by contemporary artists, commissioned for particular rooms and courtyards. Because the palazzo itself is so unfurnished, each piece registers strongly — which is the point, and which also explains why the hotel keeps its room count to single figures.

There is a long central hall, a garden with a pool cut into it, and very little programme. Guests tend to describe the experience as staying in a house rather than a hotel, and the staffing model supports that reading.