These Luxe Hotels Let You Sleep Among the World’s Finest Artwork

Last year, Valentina de Santis and her family opened an unexpected addition to their hospitality empire, which already included the world-famous, award-winning Passalacqua Hotel on Lake Como: Casabianca. It’s a contemporary art museum housed in a 1930s whitewashed mansion (hence the name) in the heart of Como. Her parents, Paolo and Antonella, are both art lovers with a particular passion for Arte Povera. To celebrate their joint 70th birthday, they vowed to give the world easy access to their lifetime collection.

“It’s about getting people to embrace the idea that art can improve your life and enrich you,” DeSantis says. The family even opened an onsite restaurant, Cova Casabianca, but something was lacking. “We’re still hoteliers at heart.” So this summer, as DeSantis exclusively revealed. Rob Report, The property will open three highly exclusive suites. In these rooms, guests can spend the night with works by Michelangelo Pistoletto, William Kentridge and more.

The best hotels have always performed well. This is a shortcut for any five-star establishment to partner with a local museum and exhibit canvases and sculptures that would otherwise be in storage. But Casabianca and a raft of other opportunities take that idea a step further: opportunity to sleep With the best artworks in the world.

The Casabianca suites are currently under construction on the third floor of the house. DeSantis collaborated with artists, including Roger Selden, to design them. “The idea is that (the rooms) will be artworks themselves,” she explains. “Some of the first guests we hope to have will be artists and gallerists.” There is no dinner service at Cova, but you can arrange in-suite after-hours catering as well as private tours. Guests will also have access to the facilities at both the family’s other hotels, Passalacqua and Grand Hotel Tremezzo.

There’s a similar allure in the four suites at the Fermonte Museum in Lecce, Puglia, where guests can use in-room lanterns to wander the hallways of the small estate dedicated to the painter and violinist Antonia Fermonte. Le Grand Contrôle, run by the five-year-old Ariels at Versailles, offers VIP treatment with after-hours entry to the palace and grounds. In Vienna, Villa Baer—a masterpiece built by architects Joseph Frank and Oscar Welch on par with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water—is to reopen as a museum this spring after a year-long restoration and includes three guest rooms in the attic. Prefer not to share a bathroom, 1930’s style? Then book them in a block.

Lisbon’s Museo d’Art Contemporanea Armando Martínez, or MACAM, opened last March alongside a five-star hotel. “Many hotels describe themselves as ‘art-focused,'” says director Adelaide Ganga, who use art primarily as decoration or branding. “We’re fundamentally different.” It occupies an impeccably redesigned 18th-century palace that houses more than 600 pieces from the private art collection of businessman and engineer Armando Martínez. 64 individually designed rooms, suites and studios. Plus, MACAM offers hotel guests exclusive access to the grounds, and they can sleep, swim and dine surrounded by late 19th-century Portuguese oil paintings and sculptures.

The Clara Art Resort opened last year inside the Inhotim Institute in Minas Gerais, Brazil, where guests not only have late-night admission to the museum, but can also enjoy informal art talks at the piano bar each evening. The OG, of course, is Benissi House, the upscale hotel that anchors Noshima, an island in Japan’s Seto Islands Sea that has become a must-see thanks to its vast assortment of site-specific pieces—and five of Monet’s. Water lily. The museum wing of the hotel provides guests with after-hours admission to the galleries. (Keep an eye out for Soichiro Fukutake, owner of Berlitz language schools. He is rumored to have his own private apartment hidden in the main structure.)

It’s a natural extension of a desire to immerse oneself in art that continues to grow—less browbeating and more connoisseur bragging rights than a walkthrough in Van Gogh’s experience. “Being able to talk about all of your behind-the-scenes exclusive access experiences tells a much better story than the price tag on your latest designer bag or luxury watch purchase,” he says. Rob Report Travel Master Jason Squattriglia.

Still, some experiences like this are truly priceless: Airbnb’s 2019 contest, A Night With Mona Lisa, generated more than 182,000 entries for the chance to sleep in a specially designed pyramid inside the Louvre. Candidates were to submit not a wire transfer but an essay answering the question “Why would you be the best guest at the Mona Lisa?” Then, with the right connection, what can stop you from even being with him?