Saturday, February 15, 2025

art hotels

Fred Pollock at El Fenn

(Image credit: Photography by Kasia Gatkowska)

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By Dalya Benor

published 2 days ago

inFeatures

With the flurry of art fairs coming up, there’s no shortage of masterworks to delight, inspire and seduce us. From Frieze Los Angeles 2025 and Contemporary African Art Fair Marrakech this February to Art Basel Hong Kong in March, the art world and its patrons have shown that if you love art, you must travel for it. So, if art is life and life is art, why not embody the avant-garde sensibility and turn even your sleeping quarters into a Gesamtkunstwerk (German for ‘total work of art’)? From contemporary art at New Hotel Athens to surrealism at the Broadwick Soho and modernism at The Fife Arms in Scotland, the following art hotels make sleeping feel like a night at the museum.

The best hotels for art lovers

The Broadwick Soho, London

The Broadwick Soho is a wild, decadent hotel in the heart of London that draws on 1970s-era discotheque opulence and smoky, velvet backrooms. Yet its maximalist design, masterminded by interior designer Martin Brudnizki (also behind the makeover of members’ club Annabel’s), is thoughtfully supplemented by an impressive art collection. Selected from hotel owner Noel Hayden’s personal collection, a series of 300 original artworks curated by Jonathan Brook match the Broadwick’s eclecticism, ranging from iconic masterworks like Andy Warhol’s shoe sketches, À la recherche du shoe perdu (1955), that were once part of David Bowie’s estate, and works by Francis Bacon and Bridget Riley, to flea-market finds and works by contemporary artists such as Faye Wei Wei and Casey Moore.

The Broadwick Soho is located at 20 Broadwick St, London W1F 8TH, United Kingdom; broadwicksoho.com

Château Voltaire

Smack dab in the centre of Paris’ 1st arrondissement, between Opéra and Tuileries, Thierry Gillier, founder of the French fashion brand Zadig & Voltaire, brought to life a five-star, 32-room hotel that feels as personal as the art on its walls. At Château Voltaire, works from Gillier’s personal collection dot the space – each room is unique, so you might wake up under a piece by Picasso or Cy Twombly, or see works by Marlene Dumas, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Stephen Shearer and Francis Picabia in the lobby and lounge. With artistic direction led by Franck Durand, and interior design by Festen, the mood is one of highly curated contemporary eclecticism with elements of elegant gothic design, in buildings that date back to the 17th and 18th centuries.

Château Voltaire is located at 55 Rue Saint-Roch, 75001 Paris, France; chateauvoltaire.com

El Fenn, Marrakech

Co-owners Vanessa Branson (sister of Richard), Madeline Weinrib (and her husband Graham Head, president of ABC Carpet & Home), along with El Fenn’s creative director Yann Dobry have all had a hand in defining the hotel’s eclectic art and interiors that blend Marrakech style with bohemian luxury. As a collector and gallerist, Branson’s taste in art has appeared throughout El Fenn’s hallways since it opened in 2004: pieces by William Kentridge, Antony Gormley, Bridget Riley and David Shrigley remain on display. The hotel, whose name means ‘house of art’, remains closely tied to culture – many contemporary Moroccan artists, such as Hassan Hajjaj and Yto Barrada are featured in the space as well.

El Fenn is located at Derb Moulay Abdullah Ben Hezzian, 2, Marrakech 40000, Morocco; el-fenn.com

el fenn marrakech hotel — David Shrigley at El Fenn

The Fife Arms, Braemar

When two of the art world’s most powerful players open a hotel, you know that the art collection will be worth the visit alone. Owned by Iwan and Manuela Wirth of the famed gallery Hauser & Wirth, The Fife Arms offers artwork to rival many major museums. A 19th-century Victorian coaching inn located in the picturesque village of Braemar in the Scottish Highlands, just about everything at the Fife Arms is extraordinary. Its jaw-dropping collection is made up of nearly 16,000 pieces that range from Pablo Picasso’s Mousquetaire Assis (1967) and Lucian Freud’s Child Portrait (1962) to a painting by Gerhard Richter, and a piece by Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Younger. The Russell Sage-designed interiors incorporate Scottish heritage with tweed and tartan accents and antiques in keeping with the property’s history. Where else can you stay with two full-time art historians who were brought on board to research Scottish history, Victoriana and contemporary art?

The Fife Arms is located at Mar Rd, Braemar, Ballater AB35 5YN, United Kingdom; thefifearms.com

New Hotel, Athens

Owned by Cypriot Dakis Joannou, one of the world’s preeminent contemporary art collectors and founder of the Deste Foundation, the New Hotel in Athens is a hub for supporting and showcasing contemporary art. Revolving exhibitions feature contemporary artists from the Athenian scene, while 20 pieces from Joannou’s personal collection also dot the walls. Works by major artists such as Jenny Holzer, Laurie Simmons, Jeff Koons and Barbara Kruger are in the hotel’s permanent collection, and there's an installation by a Greek artist in every suite. For the bibliophile, 2,000 art books are on display in the hotel’s Art Lounge. Designed by Brazilian brothers Fernando and Humberto Campana, the 79-room hotel with views of the Acropolis harkens back to classic Greek architecture but is infused with hand-selected luxury design details that nod to a forward-thinking, eclectic sensibility.

New Hotel, Athens is located at Filellinon 16, Athens 105 57, Greece; donkeyhotels.gr

Pompey Jamaica

Located in Portland Parish on Jamaica's north-east coast, Pompey is a private estate owned by American DJ and music producer Diplo, surrounded by dense rainforest on 50 acres of land. The brutalist complex designed by Freecell Architecture in collaboration with designer Gia Wolff is complemented by an art collection that includes work by artists such as Sofia Londoño, Pedro Reyes, Lucas Muñoz, Asafo Flag, Garnett Puett, Veronica Ryan and Vince Skelly. Composed of a main house, a music studio, a yoga studio, a spa and a lagoon, the interiors by Sara Nataf and Katelyn Hinden and landscape design by Geoponika provide a homely contrast to the stark concrete structure that seems to be swallowed up by its jungle surrounds – a metaphor for the hideaway that Diplo envisioned.

pompeyjamaica.com

Rhinoceros Roma

If having artwork on the walls of your hotel isn’t enough, how about sleeping above a gallery? Rhinoceros Roma in Rome’s ancient Velabro district – home to Fondazione Alda Fendi Esperimenti, the contemporary art foundation of Alda Fendi, youngest daughter of the Fendi family – allows just that. Restored by architect Jean Nouvel, the 17th-century palazzo houses 25 apartments that exude luxury with ultra-modern, Italian minimalist chic (think: lots of chrome and concrete floors). On the bottom floor, an art gallery hosts rotating exhibitions, including a partnership with the Hermitage Museum of Saint Petersburg that has shown works by Picasso, El Greco and Michelangelo.

Rhinoceros Roma is located at Via del Velabro, 9, 00186 Rome, Italy; rhinocerosroma.com

Les Roches Rouges, Saint-Raphaël

Set on the splashy landscape of the French Riviera, Les Roches Rouges in Saint-Raphaël embodies classic Côte d’Azur style with minimalist furnishings that ooze elegance. Interior design studio Festen Architecture gave the hotel’s 1950s modernist architecture a fresh vision in sun-drenched colours reminiscent of vintage Mediterranean style. Antique dealers Hélène Breheret and Benjamin Desprez selected furniture from designers such as Pierre Charreau, Willy Guhl and Charlotte Perriand, while sculptor Guy Bareff created custom Alpilles terracotta wall lamps. American artist Rosemarie Auberson made colour-block paintings based on a palette of blue tones, while artist Caroline Denervaud’s colourful abstractions add a light-hearted energy to the space.

Les Roches Rouges, Saint-Raphaël is located at 90 Bd de la 36ème division du Texas, 83530 Saint-Raphaël, France; beaumier.com

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Dalya Benor is a writer from Los Angeles, currently based in NYC. She writes about art, culture, and the in-between. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Vogue, The Art Newspaper and more. She holds a master's degree in Journalism from the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at NYU.

cultural philanthropy

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The eroding island of cultural philanthropy

Rich young people on the right and left are deserting arts nonprofits for opposite reasons

Tim Schneider

Feb 14

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Photo by Property #1, courtesy of Flickr (via Creative Commons license)

It seems almost impossible that right now, while every other headline seems to focus on the latest wild thing Donald Trump did, pundits and professionals might actually be underestimating the role politics plays in some aspect of American life. And yet, I’ve started to wonder if this is true when it comes to the art trade’s understanding of philanthropy’s increasingly unsettled future.

It’s true that a general consensus has emerged in this space: namely, that millennial and Gen Z donors think fundamentally differently about charitable giving than their Gen X and boomer predecessors, and that many nonprofits have been struggling to adapt to their new priorities. But the aggressive pivot to the political right by young voters, specifically young men, raises the possibility that the situation may be even worse than open-eyed experts already thought prior to Trump’s re-election.

Why? Because there’s reason to believe the conclusions being drawn about next-gen donors overall actually only apply to next-gen liberal donors. Young conservative donors may barely be in the picture at all—and their attitude suggests not much can be done to change their minds.

I started thinking about all this after reading Kate Lindsay’s Business Insider story about the Making Money Make Change conference in Nashville. Lindsay describes the event as one…

“… designed to help wealthy young heirs and other high-net-worth people redistribute their money to causes like housing and climate justice. The host, Resource Generation, is at the forefront of an emerging cottage industry that’s helping a new generation of trust-fund babies get rid of their wealth, rather than accumulating more… The group now boasts 1,0000 members—more than 300 of whom joined after the 2016 election—seeking to divest themselves of $100m this year alone.”

“This year alone” is an important qualifier. Attendees at the 2025 conference had a combined net worth of $246m, plus another $1.5bn or so incoming through their inheritances, according to the cumulative results of a survey completed by nearly every person at the event. (Seven attendees opted out of the questionnaire.) Their internal anguish is also a microcosm of what’s happening somewhere within the so-called Great Wealth Transfer, which will see tens of trillions of dollars bequeathed by dying boomers before 2050.

Lindsay describes the conference-goers she met as experiencing “a mix of emotions” over their net worth, led by “confusion, guilt, shame, [and] resentment.” In the story’s most beyond-satire scene, Resource Generation staff tried to help attendees cope with these feelings by instructing them to embody their “wealth shadows,” striking poses that reflected each person’s sense of the burden of their inheritance. These included a duck-and-cover-style crouch, the fetal position, and an X-shaped forearm cross over the face; afterward, attendees were given sprigs of rosemary to sniff to help them “arrive back in [their] bodies.” The exercise and the negative emotions, Lindsay writes, stemmed from “the deeply held beliefs of many Gen Zers and millennials—a sense that great wealth should serve a greater good.”

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This credo is definitely real. It just also sounds more self-selective than it did a few years ago.

Left to their own devices

Lindsay’s findings from the conference gel with what many experts in the philanthropic space have been relaying since Covid. Next-gen donors have become largely uninterested in classical forms of charitable giving to arts and culture institutions, like sponsoring a museum expansion, funding a major acquisition, or anything else that looks more like a display of soft power than a desire to make the world better for the underserved. Instead, young philanthropists tend to want to give in ways that are more impact-driven, more clearly redistributive, and more socially conscious.

This paradigm shift has been particularly unforgiving for larger, more staid arts and culture nonprofits. Leslie Ramos, an advisor on philanthropy and institutional development, put it this way in a talk I moderated at TEFAF New York last spring: “Even big institutions are struggling for funding. There is donor fatigue. It’s true that we’re experiencing levels of wealth that we haven’t seen before… but that is not necessarily translating into more donors, more supporters, and more visitors.”

The challenge is even more acute among younger benefactors. As Scott Stover, the philanthropy advisor behind the podcast Giving Back Is Dead, said in a 2023 episode of the show, next-gen donors “do not want to be seen as supporting exclusive, exclusionary activities.”

Youth isn’t the only factor that shapes donors’ approaches, though. On that same podcast episode, Anna Raginskaya, the Investing With Impact director at Morgan Stanley’s Blue Rider Group, drew a distinction between donors enriched by inherited wealth versus self-made wealth, with guilt once again being a main driver of the former’s philanthropic strategy. “There’s a real desire to demonstrate how you are more of an advocate for organizations—a connector, a producer—and less someone who writes a check and gets their name on a building for the personal satisfaction of having their name up on that building,” she said.

So, age matters, and the method of wealth accumulation matters. Other elements undoubtedly do, too. Lindsay notes in her story on Making Money Make Change, for instance, that “most” of the attendees were “young, white, queer women.” Obviously, it would be dumb and offensive to say that gender and sexual identity determined their perspective on how and why to give away their wealth. But it would be just as weird to conclude that identity factors had absolutely no influence over their philanthropic mentality—which is, in a real sense, an expression of their politics.

Of all the blind spots in the data on wealth and its transfer between generations, young heirs’ political affiliations strike me as one of the most important to the future of arts philanthropy. Then again, nonprofits may not want better visibility on this issue given the red wave washing over the demographics they need most.

The right to wreck

You don’t need me to tell you that Gen Z voters in the US broke hard for the Republican ticket in 2024. One study found that 58% of men between ages 18 and 27 voted for Trump this past November, the first time the majority of this group went red since George H.W. Bush’s presidential win in 1988.

Crucially, the clock has turned back to the ‘80s in a more overarching sense, too. Sean Monahan, the trend forecaster who named the now-infamous “vibe shift” in 2021, recently taxonomized the emergence of what he calls the “boom boom aesthetic,” a shift in taste and lifestyle choices that complements the rightward tilt of next-gen politics. Think of it as a contemporary spin on the cocaine-fueled, status-obsessed Reagan era: conspicuous consumption, ultra-luxe wardrobes, sports cars, stimulants, and the quest to become Masters of the Universe.

It’s tempting to wonder whether this cycle could actually benefit institutions that have struggled to adapt to the more progressive, socially conscious young philanthropists. After all, if people in their 20s and 30s once again want to flaunt their wealth like their excess-minded predecessors, why shouldn’t that include writing a check fat enough to get a building named after them?

I don’t buy it, though. The reason is that one of the central ingredients in the boom-boom stew is anti-institutionalism. In the ‘80s, it was cool to elbow your way to the top of society, partly because getting there meant knocking the genteel older generation down a peg or two. Going back further, in the original Gilded Age, American industrialists spent like mad, including on art and arts philanthropy, partly to prove they were even wealthier and more sophisticated than the bluest-blooded families of old Europe. It’s the reason we have the Frick, the Morgan, the Huntington, the Carnegie Museums, and more.

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But in the 2020s, there’s no clearer indicator of your superiority than either tearing the whole structure down or abandoning it to collapse on its own, while trolling everyone inside as you do it. This is especially true for the next gen, as Brock Colyar of New York wrote about the “newer type of conservative” dominating the inauguration-night party circuit in DC (emphasis theirs):

“They are not disenfranchised or working class or anti-elite or many of the other adjectives used to describe Trump supporters since 2016. Rather, they are young, imposingly well connected, urban, and very online. They are rebels once again storming Capitol Hill, though without the pathetic scariness of the January 6 rioters.”

In other words, they have exactly the donor profile a future-conscious art nonprofit would want—except for their complete and utter mismatch on values. Colyar adds (this time, emphasis mine):

“This set’s most visible political stance is a reaction to what it sees as the left’s puritanical obsessions with policing language and talking about identity. A joke about Puerto Ricans or eugenics or sleeping with Nick Fuentes could throw a pack of smokers outside [one party venue] into a gigglefest. Recounting her time at one of the balls, a woman tells me she jumped the velvet rope into a VIP section “like a little Mexican.” Then she lets out a cackle. This is the posture that has attracted newcomers to the cause.”

I don’t want to act as if US art museums have been infallible paragons of progressive ideals since Covid emerged, but they’ve tacked a hell of a lot closer to that end of the continuum than what Colyar is describing here. Remember the controversy over the Philip Guston retrospective a few years ago? Can you imagine the response a museum’s development team would get if they tried approaching the young, metropolitan MAGA crew after doing anything even remotely like that?

To be clear, I’m not proposing that art nonprofits should Trumpify themselves to attract young donors from the far right (though they’re already doing that to some extent by eliminating DEI language and programs). What I am proposing is that we should be careful about how far we draw out the parallels between the ‘80s and the mid-2020s. Back during the culture wars, Republican lawmakers were treating museums and art nonprofits as convenient targets by withdrawing public funding to advance a larger political agenda about “American values.” The difference, I think, is that most of them probably still believed the country should have public art museums. They could grandstand on allegedly offensive exhibitions because they agreed that the institutions hosting them mattered.

That’s no longer the case, either on Capitol Hill or among rich next-gen conservatives. Elected (and unelected) officials are gleefully cutting off public funding as fast as they can, forcing art nonprofits to lean harder than ever on private donors to survive. Yet the centrist and left-leaning factions of the young philanthropic class probably don’t want to donate in simple ways anymore, and the right-leaning factions probably don’t want to donate at all.

This leaves museums and other nonprofits stuck in a shrinking middle with an aging donor base whose wealth is likely to transfer toward one political pole or the other in the next couple decades. The gamble for these institutions is between reinventing themselves to the liking of the conscience-freighted young liberals—or trying to hold their ground long enough for the vibe to possibly, maybe, if they’re lucky, shift back to the center someday.

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Saturday, February 15, 2025

art hotels

Night at the museum: the best art hotels to book now

The best hotels for art lovers

The Broadwick Soho, London

Château Voltaire

El Fenn, Marrakech

The Fife Arms, Braemar

New Hotel, Athens

Pompey Jamaica

Rhinoceros Roma

Les Roches Rouges, Saint-Raphaël

cultural philanthropy

The eroding island of cultural philanthropy

Rich young people on the right and left are deserting arts nonprofits for opposite reasons

Left to their own devices

The right to wreck

Blog Archive

Saturday, February 15, 2025

art hotels

The best hotels for art lovers

The Broadwick Soho, London

Château Voltaire

El Fenn, Marrakech

Wallpaper* Newsletter

The Fife Arms, Braemar

New Hotel, Athens

Pompey Jamaica

Rhinoceros Roma

Les Roches Rouges, Saint-Raphaël

cultural philanthropy

The eroding island of cultural philanthropy

Rich young people on the right and left are deserting arts nonprofits for opposite reasons

Left to their own devices

The right to wreck