No. 1
Casa Bonay
Barcelona, Spain
Casa Bonay occupies a Neoclassical apartment building on Gran Via, in the part of Barcelona where the Eixample grid begins to loosen towards the old town. Much of what a guest notices here was already in the building before the hotel arrived: patterned hydraulic floor tiles, tall shuttered windows, plaster mouldings that were repaired rather than replaced. The design work sits on top of that inheritance instead of erasing it, which gives the interiors an unusual double reading — early twentieth-century bones, contemporary furniture, and very little pretence that the two are the same age.
Rooms vary considerably because the original apartments did. Some have balconies facing the avenue and the noise that comes with it; others turn inward to a quieter light well. Textiles, ceramics and small editions by local makers appear throughout, and the ground floor is given over to a café, a bar and a bookshop that operate on their own terms and draw people who are not staying the night. That porousness is the point: the hotel behaves like a building with several tenants rather than a single sealed institution.
It suits a traveller who wants art and design to be a condition of the stay rather than a programme attached to it. There are no gallery labels on the walls and nothing asks to be interpreted. The commissions and the collaborations simply furnish the place, and the pleasure is in noticing them at your own pace.
No. 2
Palazzo Naiadi
Rome, Italy
Palazzo Naiadi curves around one side of Piazza della Repubblica, following the line of the exedra of the Baths of Diocletian, which stood on this ground long before the nineteenth-century palazzo did. The fountain at the centre of the square gives the hotel its name. Inside, the archaeological layer is not decorative background — sections of Roman masonry are visible within the building, and the hotel's formality is partly an argument with that much older geometry.
The public rooms are grand in the plain sense: high ceilings, marble, long sightlines, considerable natural light. Guest rooms are calmer and more restrained than the lobby suggests, and the ones facing the piazza look straight at the fountain and the domed church across from it. A rooftop terrace with a pool lifts guests above the traffic and gives a view over rooftops towards the city's larger silhouettes.
Its art-hotel credentials rest less on a contemporary collection than on the building's own composition — the way a Belle Époque palace was set down onto imperial foundations and has since absorbed a modern hotel without losing either layer. Guests who enjoy reading a structure will find a great deal here to read.
No. 3
Hotel September
Cape Town, South Africa
Hotel September is small, deliberately so, and its scale is the first thing that registers. It sits in Cape Town's central bowl within walking reach of the city's gallery district, and it works at something closer to the register of a guesthouse than a hotel — a handful of rooms, a courtyard, a staff who know which guests are which by the second morning.
The interiors favour texture over spectacle: lime-washed surfaces, woven and hand-thrown pieces by South African makers, natural fibres, planting that spills from the courtyard into the circulation spaces. Colour is used sparingly and warmly. Contemporary work from the region appears on the walls without a great deal of explanation around it, which suits the building's quiet.
Because the house is compact, the rhythm of a stay differs from a large property — breakfast is an event rather than a service, and the courtyard does the work a lobby would do elsewhere. It rewards travellers who intend to spend their days in the city's studios, galleries and markets and want somewhere considered, rather than grand, to come back to.