Art Hotels

The Standard occupies the lower floors of Mahanakhon, the pixelated tower that broke up Bangkok's skyline in 2016. Spanish designer Jaime Hayon handled the interiors, and he did not hold back. Corridors run in saturated colour. Furniture is curved, oversized, occasionally absurd.

Rooms carry the same logic. Terrazzo, lacquer, bold blocks of orange and green — a palette that would exhaust a smaller building but reads as confident at this scale. Many face west over the Chao Phraya.

Beyond the guest floors, the tower's observation deck and glass ledge draw their own crowds. For the hotel, that means a property with genuine public life attached, not a sealed lobby. The restaurants operate as destinations for the city rather than amenities for guests.

Kauai's north shore is the wettest, greenest corner of the island, and 1 Hotel Hanalei Bay was rebuilt to sit inside that rather than against it. Reclaimed wood, raw stone, living walls, and a colour range borrowed straight from the surrounding valley.

Art here is regional and commissioned. Work by Hawaiian makers appears through the public rooms — weaving, carving, photography — placed as part of the architecture instead of hung as decoration.

Rooms open onto lanais facing Hanalei Bay and the ridgeline behind it. The property runs a large programme of outdoor activity, from reef walks to canoe paddling, and its environmental commitments extend to water systems, waste, and sourcing.

Few hotels sit on a more exposed address. The Crillon occupies an eighteenth-century palace on Place de la Concorde, a building designed by Ange-Jacques Gabriel and later adapted into a hotel at the turn of the twentieth century.

A four-year closure ending in 2017 rebuilt the interiors almost entirely. Several designers worked in parallel, so the register shifts as you move: restored classical salons in one wing, sharply contemporary suites elsewhere. Karl Lagerfeld designed two of them.

The art programme mixes period pieces held by the house with contemporary commissions, and the restoration itself functioned as a conservation project — gilding, panelling and stonework treated by specialists rather than replaced.