The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Picture-perfect stays
A growing number of UK hotels are sharing their impressive art collections with guests. Sarah Turner gets drawn in
In the restaurant of the recently opened East Sussex hotel the Star at Alfriston (thepolizzicollection.com/ the-star) is a portrait of a woman wearing a large ruff. It hangs above a 16thcentury sideboard that groans each morning with fruit, yogurt and pastries. Gaze at it long enough, however, and you may see the subject blink or make a small, almost imperceptible movement: rather than the Dutch canvas it resembles, Transforming Portrait Painting (2016-17) is actually a 20-minute looped digital film of model Saga Rickmer created by husband and wife artists Rob and Nick Carter.
“The work is about rewarding extended looking,” says Rob Carter. “I saw a study that said the average person looks at a work of art in a museum between four and six seconds.” It is one of several key works of art in mother-and-daughter hoteliers Olga and Alex Polizzi’s latest venture.
Bringing art into hotels is not new. In the 1920s, Paul Roux, owner of the Colombe d’Or in the French Riviera village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence (lacolombe-dor.com), encouraged his post-Impressionist artist guests to settle their bill with a painting or sculpture. Today, the hotel’s walls contain works by Chagall, Matisse, Picasso and Klee. In the 1990s, Benesse House (benesse-artsite.jp) on the Japanese island of Naoshima brought in artists to create site-specific pieces. Now its 65 rooms each boast a single work from artists including British sculptors Richard Long and Antony Gormley.
Art has since become part of hotels’ experiential mix, especially in the luxury market. In Australia, the Jackalope near Melbourne (jackalopehotels. com) features specially commissioned works, while in South Africa’s Cape Town, the Silo (theroyalportfolio.com/ the-silo/overview) shares a building with the largest collection of contemporary African work in the world.
In Britain art hotels outside of London are on the rise– and they make for the perfect autumnal stay. In Hampshire, Heckfield Place (heckfieldplace. com) is the backdrop for owner Gerard Chan’s collection of contemporary art,
which includes works by Elsbeth Juda, David Spiller and Mary Fedden. Artfarm, a hospitality firm owned by gallerists Manuela and Iwan Wirth, has the six-bedroom Durslade Farmhouse (dursladefarmhouse.co.uk), which mixes 18th-century architecture with specially commissioned artworks, including a mural by Guillermo Kuitca. Further north, Artfarm’s 46-bedroom Fife Arms (thefifearms.com) in Braemar features works by Martin Creed, Louise Bourgeois, Man Ray and Lucian Freud amid its high Victorian architecture.
Next year Artfarm opens its first Lon
don hotel in the five-storey Victorian red brick Albany building on Mayfair’s Mount Street. The ground floor pub will be retained and architect Luis Laplace will oversee the addition of hotel rooms.
Not all art hotels are at the luxury end of the market. Margate’s Walpole Bay Hotel (walpolebayhotel.co.uk) launched its Napery gallery in 2009. In the tradition of the Colombe d’Or, artist guests are asked to decorate linen napkins and among those who have are Martin Parr, Christian Furr and Tracey Emin. Rooms start at £85 a night. So get booking – and viewing.