Europe's best art hotels – where to sleep with Picasso, Calder and a sculpture park

Most hotels buy art to fill walls. A few have collections that would make a museum envious, and they show them the way a private collector would – on the terrace, beside the pool, above the bed. The four below are very different: a family inn in a Provençal hill village, a Highland hotel reimagined by gallerists, a vineyard turned sculpture park and a waterfront hotel next to a modern art museum. What unites them is that the art came first in the thinking, and that guests live with it rather than file past it.

La Colombe d'Or, Saint-Paul-de-Vence

In 1920, back from the First World War, a farmer named Paul Roux opened a café-bar called Chez Robinson in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. With the support of his wife Titine he extended it and reopened it as the Colombe d'Or, a three-room inn, and painters began to arrive. Many were not yet famous, and they paid in kind: works by Léger, Braque, Calder, Buffet, Matisse, Chagall and Picasso came to the walls through informal exchanges for meals and rooms. A sign in the hotel says, in French, that it lodges those who come on horseback, on foot or with paintings.

The collection is not displayed so much as lived with. A Léger hangs on the terrace, a Calder mobile sits by the pool, and the most recent major addition is a large ceramic by Sean Scully. The Roux family still runs the hotel, now in its third generation. For the rest of the Riviera, see our city guides on verapi.fr.

Villa La Coste, Provence

Château La Coste in Provence is a 600-acre organic wine estate that is also a sculpture park and art destination. Its owner, the Irish property developer Paddy McKillen, has gathered art and architecture by a remarkable list: Tadao Ando, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, Frank Gehry, Andy Goldsworthy, Kengo Kuma, Oscar Niemeyer, Jean Nouvel, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Richard Serra, Lee Ufan, Ai Weiwei and Franz West, among others. The estate's luxury hotel, Villa La Coste, lets guests live in the middle of it, among the vines.

The Fife Arms, Braemar

In the village of Braemar, in Scotland's Cairngorms National Park, the gallerists Iwan and Manuela Wirth of Hauser & Wirth reopened The Fife Arms, named The Sunday Times Hotel of the Year 2019. Alongside a collection of masterworks and antiques, they commissioned new work for the building: Zhang Enli's Ancient Quartz spreads across the drawing-room ceiling, Guillermo Kuitca painted a mural for the Clunie Dining Room, and Bharti Kher made a triptych of bindis called Cipher. The result is a Highland hotel that feels like a private collection with fireplaces.

The Thief, Oslo

On the islet of Tjuvholmen – "Thief Islet", once notorious for its robbers – The Thief opened on 9 January 2013 next to the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art. A collaboration with the museum gives the hotel a large collection of contemporary art, and Sune Nordgren, the former director of Norway's National Museum, chose the paintings, prints, sculptures and installations for the rooms and public spaces. The hotel has 119 rooms and is part of Petter Stordalen's Nordic Hotels & Resorts. It is the most urban of the four, and the easiest to combine with a weekend of museums.

How to make the most of an art hotel

Ask at reception whether there is a guide to the collection or a tour. Take the early morning and the evening, when public areas are quiet. And look up the local museums: The Thief sits beside the Astrup Fearnley. For more art travel, see our guide to Europe's most private-feeling museums, our culture section, our travel section and metromode.co.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.