Art Hotels

Hotel Monteleone has stood on Royal Street since the 1880s, and it has been run by the same family for the whole of that time — a continuity that shows up in the building rather than in the marketing. The Beaux-Arts facade, the grand clock in the lobby and the ornamented public rooms were added and revised over successive expansions, so the property reads as a stack of eras rather than a single design statement.

Its best-known room is the Carousel Bar, a circular counter that rotates slowly on a hidden mechanism. The literary association is genuine and long-standing: the hotel has housed a considerable number of Southern writers over the decades, and the corridors carry that history openly. Guest rooms are conventional in plan, which is part of the appeal — the character is concentrated in the shared spaces and the fabric of the building itself.

The NoMad occupies the former Giannini Place in downtown Los Angeles, a 1920s bank headquarters with a banking hall that was never designed to be modest. The conversion kept the monumental volumes and the coffered ceilings and then furnished them densely — layered rugs, heavy drapery, framed pictures hung to the picture rail — so the interior feels closer to a very large private apartment than to a hotel lobby.

Rooms follow the same logic at smaller scale: dark wood, freestanding tubs in some categories, and a deliberate refusal of the pale minimalism that dominates the city's newer hotels. A rooftop pool and bar sit above it all, which is where the building finally admits it is in Los Angeles.

Unlike most of the Ace properties, the Brooklyn hotel was built new rather than carved out of an existing structure. The result is unusually coherent: board-formed concrete, a double-height lobby that functions as a public room for the neighbourhood, and a restrained material palette of oak, steel and rough plaster carried consistently from the street door to the guest floors.

Art is commissioned rather than bought off the wall, and much of it is site-specific. Rooms are plain in a considered way — good beds, a turntable in some categories, generous windows — and the building leans on its Boerum Hill setting instead of trying to substitute for it.