Chapter A-100 — floor plan

Art Hotels

Hotels where the building, its collection and its commissions are part of the reason to book a room.

3 rooms drawn | single column | no scale implied

A.01

The Ludlow Hotel

New York, United States

The Ludlow sits on a narrow Lower East Side lot and behaves like a building that grew out of the block rather than one dropped onto it. Its lobby leans on a stone fireplace, worn leather and a tall garden window, so the room reads more like a residence than a reception hall. Guest rooms are compact in the way Manhattan rooms usually are, but the studios carry iron-framed casement windows that pull the street elevation inside. Artwork and photography are hung throughout rather than concentrated in a single gallery corridor, which keeps the character distributed across the floors.

Lower East Side | Iron casement windows | Garden courtyard | Residence-style lobby

A.02

Hotel Brummell

Barcelona, Spain

Hotel Brummell occupies a converted residential building at the foot of Montjuïc, in the Poble-sec district, and much of its appeal comes from how carefully the original structure was kept. Interior courtyards, tiled floors and existing openings were retained where possible, with new work kept deliberately plain so the old surfaces stay legible. A small pool sits in the back patio, shaded by planting rather than architecture. The hotel keeps an informal daytime rhythm — a lot of its guests treat the ground floor as a workroom.

Poble-sec district | Converted residential building | Patio pool | Retained tilework

A.03

Hotel Not Hotel

Rotterdam, Netherlands

Hotel Not Hotel builds each room as a separate constructed object rather than a repeated module — a sleeping space behind a bookcase, a berth inside a reconstructed vehicle body, a cabin raised on a frame. The Rotterdam location carries that idea into a post-war commercial interior, where the rooms read as installations set within a larger open volume. Because the pieces are individually designed, no two stays look alike, and the shared floor works as the connective space between them. It is a hotel that treats its own plan as the exhibit.

Individually built rooms | Open shared volume | Installation-style berths | Rotterdam centre