Art Hotels

Sunset Tower stands on the Sunset Strip as a piece of 1929 Art Deco that never quite agreed to be modernised away. The tower's stepped white facade, its bas-relief panels and the long vertical ribs that carry the eye upward are the reason the building is protected rather than replaced, and they set the tone for everything inside.

The hotel reads as a period interior kept in working order rather than a gallery. Lacquered surfaces, curved plaster, mirrored panels and a restrained palette run through the public rooms; the bar and dining room hold their original geometry, and the terrace looks south across the flat sprawl of the basin. Guest rooms are quieter than the facade suggests, with the same Deco vocabulary reduced to trim, joinery and a few strong lines.

It is a hotel that rewards slowness. The lift lobby, the corridor proportions and the way daylight falls through the tall windows are the exhibits, and there is no wall text explaining any of it.

Set at the tip of Cap d'Antibes among twenty hectares of pine and cypress, this is one of the oldest grand hotels on the French Riviera, opened in the nineteenth century as a retreat for writers and developed over decades into the white villa and clifftop pavilion known today.

The property's art is largely its setting: formal gardens, umbrella pines, gravel walks and the saltwater pool cut into the rock at Eden-Roc, where the Mediterranean sits directly below the terrace. Inside, the register is pale and classical — stone floors, tall shuttered windows, framed works and furniture chosen to disappear against the light rather than compete with it.

Rooms are spread between the main house, the seafront pavilion and garden villas, so the experience shifts considerably depending on where a guest is placed. The constant is the landscape, which has been composed as carefully as any interior.

Villa Schuler has been run by the same family since 1905, occupying a terraced position above Taormina with Mount Etna on one side and the Ionian Sea on the other. It is a small hotel rather than a grand one, and its character comes from continuity rather than reinvention.

The house is a Sicilian villa with painted shutters, tiled floors and a subtropical garden that has been planted and replanted across four generations — bougainvillea, citrus, palms and jasmine layered down the slope in narrow terraces. Framed prints, family photographs and nineteenth-century furniture fill the salon and breakfast room, giving the interior the feeling of a private collection that simply happens to receive guests.

The best hours are early and late, when the terrace faces a clear view of the volcano and the town's noise has not yet reached the garden.