Art Hotels

Commissioned for the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition and opened the year before it, the Alfonso XIII — named after the king who ordered it — was conceived as a piece of civic architecture that happened to take guests. It sits at the edge of the old tobacco factory grounds, a short walk from the cathedral, behind a facade of brick, arched openings and glazed ceramic.

The interior is Mudejar revival carried through at full strength: horseshoe arches, carved plasterwork, coffered ceilings and hand-painted azulejo tiles running waist-high along the corridors. The central patio is the building's organising idea, an open arcaded courtyard with a fountain that the public rooms all face onto.

Rooms are large by European standards and vary in decorative register, some leaning Castilian, some Moorish, some plainly Andalusian. For a guest, the practical appeal is position and quiet; for anyone interested in the period, the building is one of the more complete surviving statements of Spanish revivalist design.

Sir Adam occupies several floors of a tower on the north bank of the IJ, a former office block built for an oil company and later converted into a cultural building. Guests cross the water by ferry from behind Amsterdam Centraal, a two-minute trip that does more to reframe the city than any map.

The hotel's theme is music, handled with restraint rather than as decor. Rooms are dark-walled and low-lit, with a guitar and amplifier available in many of them, and the emphasis falls on the windows, which run the full width and look out over the harbour, the rail yards and the older city beyond.

The building's other tenants include a revolving observation deck and a club in the basement, so the hotel operates inside a busier structure than most. That suits the location: this is the industrial side of the river, still visibly working, and the hotel does not pretend otherwise.

The name comes from the museum and conservatoire a few streets away, and the hotel keeps something of that institution's character: measured, slightly technical, more interested in materials than in ornament. It stands in the third arrondissement on the rue du Mail side of the Marais, in a Haussmann-era building given a thorough contemporary interior.

Walnut, blackened steel, leather and terrazzo do most of the work. The ground floor holds a restaurant and a bar that fill with neighbourhood regulars rather than guests alone, and a rooftop terrace opens across the zinc roofs toward the Pompidou and Montmartre when the weather allows.

Rooms are compact, as central Paris rooms are, but the joinery is unusually good and the planning is clever about storage. It is a design hotel in the older sense of the phrase: the design is structural, not applied.