The Art of Hospitality

Over the holidays, my family treated each other to two nights of a bougie hotel experience in Encinitas, instead of forcing one family member to host Christmas. The pricey hotel experience featured the work of a choice local photographer as artist-in-residence; an ocean-loving surfing creative artist-athlete whose huge glossy canvases transformed the hotel’s corridors – along with appropriate poetry drawn from recent songs about Encinitas – to gallery spaces throughout the large three-story hotel on the beachfront bluffs. Hyatt’s Alila Resorts, headquartered in Singapore, comprises 17 such beach properties.

If you remember the generic landscapes that were glued or nailed to the walls of the old Holiday Inns of the 1990s and before – by contrast these art-themed luxury properties target as their market those ‘culture-mavens’ who demand the finer things in life, such as art. No longer nailing down their framed reproductions or common garden giclées, hoteliers now offer museum-grade art exhibitions. Art as a theme in business has found homes in hip office buildings, modern airports, unrented storefronts, even upon large international airplanes, such as Cathay Pacific’s brainchild of flying art called Gallery in the Skies. 

Many luxury destinations focus today on the local: local food, history, artists, colors, furnishings, and architecture. One hotel in Italy commissioned local artists who work ONLY in FOUND objects to create sculpture. This trend (sustainable and local), called “site responsivity,” introduces (and charges for) cultural reflections of a certain environment’s local history, traditions, and flavor. Various hotels have enough money and have discovered the importance of owning their own permanent collection of local art, supporting local creative types.

On the other hand, some marvelous hotels are situated inside of historic mansions, palaces, or country estates that have traditionally held their own collection of art and sculpture. For example, Ca’ Sagredo Hotel, Venice, is located in an Italian National Monument, canal-side, a 15^th century palace once owned by generations of the Segredo family. The family were passionate collectors of fine art and great architecture from the 15^th to the 18^th century, commissioning paintings, sculptures, frescoes, murals, and prime stucco work. Today you eat your breakfast in a palatial room gazing up at a mural titled The Defeat of Vices, a ceiling painting framed by ornate rococo stucco. The ballroom features a parade of frolicking gods of Olympus covering the four walls and the ceiling. 

Last month I covered Art Basel Miami Beach, a gathering of art lovers and culture hounds. The Faena Hotel on the beach there showed numerous local artists’ temporary installations; one such site-specific installation featured a massive, commissioned sandcastle maze titled Journey Through the Algorithmic Self.

Santa Barbara’s Belmond El Encanto has a sister hotel that MOVES. This property was acquired when Belmond noticed the rise in European night trains as an alternative to air travel. Belmond has re-introduced the luxury of the 1920s ‘Venice Simplon-Orient-Express.’ (Prices between some cities can set you back over $60,000 a night per person; the least amount you can pay for the Paris to Portofino line is around $4,000 per person; meals and champagne included!) Imagine 17 authentic beautifully restored 1920s carriages, and one bespoke, contemporary carriage of a special nature. Belmond has commissioned the ultra-cool photographer/graffiti/street artist JR to create a unique Oculus room, an observatory. JR is known for his activism and counterculture photographs, portraits, lithographs, and graffiti which began some 20 years ago in the back streets of Paris, on the walls of rundown buildings in disenfranchised neighborhoods. Lately his work includes a collaboration with the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center, mounting an interactive floor installation which is danced upon, and portraits upon the wall of an abandoned hospital on Ellis Island.

Belmond has asked JR to design and execute a carriage that will focus upon the art of stargazing. Imagine a sleeper car with marvelous surreal oculi overhead through which to see the moving stars, while hearing the clack of the rails.  L’Observatoire, the bespoke sleeper carriage, will open March 2025, designed to encourage just such a delightful activity while lying upon your back. Art Net Magazine quotes the artist: “The interior flows through several micro-environments, from the bedroom, with a free-standing bathtub, a lounge, a library, and a hidden tearoom with never-before-seen oculus shaped skylights.” Design, craft, art; a holistic approach to space and location is the new creative economy for such elite hotels, aimed at capturing the very wealthy travelling creative class who are in search of – and will demand – a premier “bougie” experience.