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Art House: Hotels that are truly pieces of art
Hotels as performance art - for the traveller who wants more than just a fluffy bathrobe.
By Clara Young
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Like the Salon Parisien, Mariaud's loft is artsy and convivial. "This isn't a place you should come to if you're looking for privacy," she says. "I've come home and found guests I hadn't met yet sitting on the couch, playing banjo for my daughter. People who are staying here meet one another. A lot of times, we end up having dinner parties together."
Rather than living in a work of art or living where artists work, Mariaud's loft is about living with art, which just happens to be the name of the hotel. "I wanted to make art collecting less intimidating," says Mariaud. "People have preconceived notions about it: that you have to be educated, that art has to be precious. I wanted to create a space that is warm, unpretentious and lived in. I put art everywhere. I want people to feel comfortable having art around them."
Big hotel chains are also beginning to see the cosmetic appeal of contemporary art. Le Méridien recently hired curator Jerome Sans - formerly of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris - to make its hotels art-compliant. Sans' job is to create a global creative cartel made up of 100 individuals - which the hotel has dubbed "LM100" - that will include international artists to design the hotel's key cards and musicians to create distinctive "sound environments" in its elevators and lobbies. Visual artist and writer Sam Samore has written a collection of bedtime fairy tales that are to Le Méridien's bedside tables what Gideon Bibles are to others.
"What Le Méridien wants to do is almost pedagogical," explains Sans. "We want to bring new, original experiences to people who are out of touch with creative things and don't have the time or knowledge to seek them out. My role is to bring in people who will create unforgettable experiences that transform the banal into something that will transport our guests and change their lives."
A stay at Le Méridien might not be an encounter with the sublime. But from a marketing point of view, contemporary art may become what design was to the hotel industry in the '80s. Park Plaza Hotels has been dabbling in art strategies for the past five years with "art'otels," a small chain of European boutique hotels, each of which showcases an artist. The art'otel Budapest, for example, shows some 600 pieces by painter Donald Sultan, who also had an influence on the design of the hotel.
These hotels are banking on art to draw in the frequent flyers - the young, hip and cool who have loads of disposable income. This entails that, in addition to the armchairs designed by Christian Liaigre, there are avant-garde videos looping on the flat screen television over the headboard and bird sounds piped into the bathroom, and there's a Jeff Wall photograph on the wall in the conference room.
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ELLE's travel guides: Asia
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