Art Hotels

Fogo Island Inn stands on stilts at the edge of the North Atlantic, a long white bar of a building set against bare rock and weather. It was built by a charitable foundation with the stated aim of returning money to the island community, and that intention shows up in the fabric of the place: the quilts, the furniture and the textiles were made by island makers working from designs developed on site.

Every guest room faces the ocean. The interiors are spare rather than decorative, and the art programme runs alongside a residency scheme that brings artists to the island for extended stays, which keeps the hotel closer to a working studio than to a gallery with beds.

The Jaffa occupies a nineteenth-century French hospital and the remains of a medieval structure beside it, in the old port district south of central Tel Aviv. The conversion left the stone arcades and the chapel largely intact and set contemporary interiors inside them, so the building reads as two periods held in the same frame rather than one smoothed over the other.

Works from a private collection are placed through the public rooms, including pieces that address the building's own layered history. The former chapel now serves as a lounge, which is the clearest illustration of the approach taken throughout: old volumes kept, new uses admitted.

Hotel Saint Cecilia sits behind oak trees in a residential part of South Austin, spread across a Victorian main house and a set of low-slung poolside studios and bungalows. It is deliberately small and deliberately screened from the street, and it has kept a reputation as a place where musicians stay without being turned into a theme.

The rooms are furnished as rooms rather than as displays — record players, mid-century pieces, black-and-white photography on the walls. The name comes from the patron saint of music, and the hotel's interest in sound is handled quietly, through what is in the room rather than through signage.