My family treated each other to two nights over the holidays at a bougie hotel experience in Encinitas instead of forcing one member to host Christmas. The pricey hotel experience featured the work of a choice local photographer as artist in residence. Huge glossy canvases by an ocean-loving surfing creative artist-athlete—along with appropriate poetry drawn from recent songs about Encinitas—transformed the large three-story hotel on the beach-bluffs into gallery spaces. Hyatt’s Alila Resorts, headquartered in Singapore, contains seventeen such beach properties.
If you remember the generic landscapes glued or nailed to the walls of the old Holiday Inns of the 1990s and before, these art-themed luxury properties target ‘culture-mavens’ who demand the finer things in life, such as art. No longer nailing down their framed reproductions or common garden giclees, hoteliers offer museum-grade art exhibitions. Art as a theme in business has found homes in hip office buildings, modern airports, unrented storefronts, even on large international airplanes, such as Cathay Pacific’s brainchild of flying art called “Gallery in the Skies.”
Many luxury destinations focus on local: food, history, artists, colors, furnishings, and architecture. One hotel in Italy commissioned local artists who ONLY work in FOUND objects to create sculpture. This trend, sustainable and local, called “site responsivity,” introduces, and charges for, cultural reflections of a certain environment’s local history, traditions, and flavor. Various hotels have enough money and have discovered the importance of owning their own permanent collection of local art, supporting local creative types.
On the other hand
Some marvelous hotels are situated inside of historic mansions, palaces, or country estates that have traditionally held their own collection of art and sculpture. For example, Ca’Segredo Hotel, Venice, located in an Italian National Monument, canal-side, a palace once owned by generations of the Segredo family, built in the 15th century. The family were passionate collectors of fine art and great architecture from the 15th to the 18th century, commissioning paintings, sculptures, frescos, murals, and prime stucco work. Today you eat your breakfast in a palatial room gazing up to a mural titled The Defeat of Vices, a ceiling painting framed by ornate rococo stucco. The ballroom features a parade of frolicking gods of Olympus covering the four walls and the ceiling.
Last month I covered Art Basel Miami Beach, a gathering of art lovers and culture hounds; the Faena Hotel on the beach there showed numerous local artists’ temporary installations, one such site-specific installation featured a massive, commissioned sandcastle maze titled Journey Through the Algorithmic Self.
Santa Barbara’s Belmond El Encanto has a sister hotel that MOVES. Belmond acquired this property when they noticed the rise in European night trains as an alternative to air travel. Belmond re-introduced the luxury of the 1920s ‘Venice Simplon Orient Express.’ Prices between some cities set you back over $60,000 a night per person. The least amount you pay for the Paris to Portofino line goes for around $4,000 per person. Meals and champagne included!
Imagine seventeen authentic beautifully restored 1920s carriages, and one bespoke, contemporary carriage of a special nature. Belmond commissioned the ultra-cool photographer/graffiti/street artist ‘JR’ to create an unique Oculus room, an observatory. JR became known for his activism and counterculture photographs, portraits, lithographs, and graffiti which began 20 years ago in the back streets of Paris on the walls of rundown buildings in disenfranchised neighborhoods. Lately his work includes a collaboration with the New York city Ballet at Lincoln Center, mounting an interactive floor installation which is danced on, and portraits on the wall of an abandoned hospital on Ellis Island.
Belmond asked JR to design a carriage that focuses on the art of stargazing. Imagine a sleeper car with marvelous surreal oculi overhead through which to see the moving stars, while hearing the clack of the rails. “L’Observatorie,” the bespoke sleeper carriage, opens March 2025, executed to encourage a delightful activity while lying on your back.
Art Net Magazine quotes the artist: “The interior flows through several micro-environments, from the bedroom, with a free-standing bathtub, a lounge, a library, and a hidden tearoom with never seen before oculus shaped skylights.” Design, craft, art; an holistic approach to space and location is the new creative economy for such elite hotels, aimed towards the very wealthy travelling creative class who are in search of—and will demand—a premier “bougie” experience.