Art Hotels

Hotel Californian sits a short walk from the waterfront in Santa Barbara's Funk Zone, on a corner that was rebuilt after the 1925 earthquake flattened the original building. The current hotel keeps the Spanish Colonial silhouette the city insists on, then fills the inside with something considerably less predictable: Moorish tilework, geometric screens and a colour palette drawn from Morocco rather than California.

The interiors were shaped as a single commission rather than assembled piecemeal, and the result reads as one continuous idea running from the lobby through the corridors to the rooftop. Guest rooms vary a great deal in size and outlook, with the upper floors angling toward the harbour. A pool deck on the roof does most of the social work in the evenings.

COMO The Halkin opened in Belgravia in 1991 as one of the first London hotels to argue that a small building could be a serious one. There are fewer than fifty rooms behind a Georgian-style brick facade on a quiet residential street, and the hotel has never tried to grow past that.

Where many London hotels lean on antiques, the Halkin went the other way: pale wood, curved walls, a restrained Italian-influenced modernism that was unusual for the neighbourhood at the time and still is. Art and object placement is sparse and deliberate. The building's proximity to Hyde Park corner makes it a short walk from a great deal of the city while feeling entirely removed from it.

Casa Fayette occupies a 1940s mansion in Guadalajara's Lafayette district, extended upward with a contemporary block that makes no attempt to imitate the original. The two halves are left visibly different, which is the point: the older house holds the public rooms, the new volume holds most of the bedrooms.

The design work mixes mid-century Mexican furniture with commissioned pieces and a strong graphic sensibility that carries into the signage and the bar. A rooftop terrace and pool look across a neighbourhood full of galleries and design studios, and the hotel functions as part of that scene rather than adjacent to it.