Art Hotels

Glass on one side. Baroque on the other. art'otel Budapest sits on the Buda embankment of the Danube, and its river-facing wing is a modern seven-storey block looking across the water towards Parliament and the Chain Bridge.

Walk round to the back and the hotel changes character. Four eighteenth-century townhouses, restored and joined to the new wing, face up the hill towards the Castle District. Rooms in the old houses have high ceilings and period detail; rooms in the new wing are cleaner and more alike.

What ties the two halves together is one painter. The American artist Donald Sultan is the hotel's signature artist, and his work runs through the public spaces and the bedrooms in their hundreds. His motifs turn up in small places too, which is part of the fun of staying.

Raw concrete, big windows, no chandeliers. Hotel Daniel Vienna occupies a converted 1960s office building on the Landstraßer Gürtel, a short walk from the Belvedere and close to the main railway station.

The hotel calls its approach smart luxury, and in practice that means rooms with open layouts, glass-walled showers and very little that is there just for show. Design carries the stay. The building's post-war bones are left visible rather than dressed up.

Downstairs, a bakery-restaurant serves the ground floor and the street. On the roof there are beehives and planted beds, and the honey ends up in the hotel's small shop. For a city better known for gilt and stucco, it is a deliberate change of register.

London's first art'otel opened inside the Battersea Power Station regeneration, in a building by Foster + Partners on Electric Boulevard. The landmark chimneys stand next door.

Its rooms and public areas are the work of Spanish artist and designer Jaime Hayon, who is both interior designer and signature artist here. Expect colour, curves and playful forms; his pieces draw on the power station's industrial history as well as on the new district growing around it.

Above it all is a rooftop pool with a view of the skyline. Restaurants sit at street level and at the top of the building, and a studio space hosts art-led sessions for guests. Few hotels in the city commit so fully to one hand.