Art Hotels

The Georgia opened in 1927 and spent the better part of a decade in the 2000s stripped back to its frame, which is an unusual thing for a hotel of its reputation to survive. What came back in 2011 was not a replica. The restoration kept the walnut panelling, the lobby proportions and the exterior stonework, then hung the interiors with a working collection of Canadian contemporary art — pieces commissioned or acquired for specific walls rather than bought as a set.

That distinction matters when you walk the corridors. The hang is uneven in the good sense: a large abstract holds one landing, a small photographic work sits almost apologetically beside a lift, and the ballroom carries something closer to a period piece. Guests who care about the collection tend to find it by wandering; the hotel does not force a tour on anyone.

The rest of the building behaves like a full-service city hotel. There is a lap pool below ground, a bar that fills early and stays full, and a location on Georgia Street that puts the art gallery, the theatre district and the harbour within a walk. It is a hotel for people who want the art to be present without being the entire proposition.

The Wittmore is small — around two dozen rooms — and hidden down a lane in the Gothic Quarter that most people walk past. Its art programme is correspondingly compact: a tight selection of works, largely prints and photography, chosen to sit against dark panelling and deep colour rather than to dominate it. The effect is closer to a private club that happens to collect than to a gallery that happens to have beds.

Adults only, which the hotel states plainly, and built around a courtyard that does a lot of work in a dense part of the city. The rooftop is the other quiet asset: not large, not a destination bar, but enough of a terrace to make the difference between a hotel room in the old town and a hotel room with somewhere to sit.

Rooms vary considerably in shape, as they will in a converted building of this age. Some are snug. The trade for that is a location inside the medieval street grid, a few minutes from the cathedral and the Born on foot, in a hotel that stays notably quiet given what is going on outside its door.

The Danieli occupies a fourteenth-century palazzo on the Riva degli Schiavoni, and its most famous room is not a bedroom but the stairwell — a Gothic staircase rising through a courtyard of arches and gilded balustrades that reads as architecture first and hotel lobby a distant second. This is art in the older sense: ornament, marble, plasterwork and paint that were commissioned centuries before anyone thought to rent the building by the night.

It has been a hotel since the early nineteenth century, which makes it one of the longest-running in the city, and its guest list over that period is part of what people come for. The building has expanded into adjoining structures, so rooms range from grand lagoon-facing suites to considerably plainer inland ones; the gap between the two is wide and worth researching before booking.

Position is the other argument. It sits on the waterfront a short walk from the Piazza San Marco, with the Doge's Palace essentially next door. The hotel has undergone extended restoration work in recent years, as buildings of this age periodically require.