Art Hotels

Two buildings meet at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 28th Street here: an 1850s mansion of the old Madison Square kind, and a new tower rising behind it. Neither pretends the other is not there. The join is left visible, and walking from the historic rooms into the modern wing is a change of century that the hotel makes no effort to soften.

What fills those rooms is the point. Pattern is layered on pattern, colour on colour, with antiques, commissioned pieces and textiles arranged by a designer who clearly did not believe in a neutral wall. Rooms differ from one another because the older floors were never built to a repeating plan, and the restaurant and bar draw a crowd from the neighbourhood rather than only from upstairs.

The Chelsea opened in 1884 as a co-operative apartment building and became a hotel a couple of decades later, which explains the proportions: high ceilings, deep rooms, and wrought-iron balconies stacked twelve storeys up a red-brick front on West 23rd Street. The staircase wraps around an open shaft all the way to the skylight, and it is still the most photographed thing in the building.

Long-term residents, many of them writers, painters and musicians, filled the walls with their own work over a century, and a good deal of that art stayed through the long restoration that closed the hotel for years. The result is unusual: a hotel whose collection was not bought but accumulated, hung in stairwells and corridors rather than curated into a gallery.

The Duhau palace was built in the 1930s for an Argentine family who wanted a French château on a Recoleta street, and it still reads that way from the pavement. A second, contemporary building stands behind it, and the two are linked underground and through a terraced garden that steps down between them — one of the largest private gardens in the centre of the city.

An art gallery runs along the passage joining old to new, showing Argentine work on a rotating basis, so guests crossing between the wings pass through an exhibition whether or not they intended to. The palace rooms keep their panelling and fireplaces; the modern wing is plainer and quieter. Both look onto the same garden.