Art Hotels

Hotel Jerome was built at the height of Aspen's silver boom and survived the decades when the town around it emptied out, which is the short version of why the building still reads as a nineteenth-century commercial hotel rather than a resort. The brick facade, the arched windows and the proportions of the ground-floor rooms are original in spirit, and the interiors lean on that history instead of hiding it. Art here is less a gallery programme than an accumulation: photographs of the mining and early ski eras, Western painting, furniture and objects chosen to sit inside a room rather than announce themselves. The bar remains the most-used room in the building, and a great deal of the hotel's character comes from the fact that locals treat it as a fixture of the town. It is a place people visit for the room they end up sitting in, not only the room they sleep in.

The building began as a wool store, and the conversion kept the parts that make that obvious — heavy ironbark posts, exposed beams, brickwork, and floor plates that are wider and taller than a purpose-built hotel would have been. Rooms are cut into that frame, which means no two floors feel quite identical and the corridors have the slightly irregular geometry of an industrial structure adapted rather than replaced. The art angle is specific: photography, shown throughout the public rooms and treated as the house medium rather than a decorative afterthought. Its location in Pyrmont puts it a short walk from Darling Harbour and the fish market while keeping it out of the central business district's density. Guests who come for the architecture tend to spend a while in the lobby atrium, which is the clearest single view of what the original building was.

Saint-James occupies a building that was never meant to be a hotel — a mansion raised in the 1890s on the site of an early ballooning field, standing in a walled garden that is unusual for central Paris. That garden explains most of the experience: the property is entered off the street and then turns inward, so the noise of the 16th arrondissement drops away within a few metres. The interiors have been reworked more than once by named designers, and the current scheme is dense, layered and unapologetically decorative, with pattern, colour and fabric doing the work that white walls do elsewhere. There is a library bar that operates as the social centre of the house, and the scale of the public rooms stays domestic rather than hotel-like. It appeals to people who want a Paris stay that feels like a private address.