Best Pitch Battles

Side One

Art Hotels

Three hotels where the art is not hung as decoration but sits in the structure of the place — a colonial facade re-cut for contemporary use, a motel strip turned into a study in colour, a Paris townhouse furnished like a private drawing room. Read them in order or skip the needle to whichever one you want.

Side One

Side One — Art Hotels

  1. 01

    The Slate Yangon

    Yangon, Myanmar

    Yangon keeps more intact early-twentieth-century architecture than almost any city in Southeast Asia, largely because decades of isolation left the downtown grid alone. The Slate works inside that inheritance rather than against it: a restored colonial-era building whose teak, tile and tall shuttered openings were kept, with contemporary furniture and rotating work by Burmese artists set against them.

    Rooms are modest in number, which gives the ground floor an unhurried feel — the lobby doubles as exhibition space, and guests tend to drift through it rather than pass across it. The surrounding blocks are walkable, dense, and best seen early, before the heat settles.

    Restored colonial-era buildingWork by Burmese artistsDowntown Yangon, walkable
  2. 02

    The Standard, Miami

    Miami, United States

    Set on Belle Isle, a small island between South Beach and the mainland, The Standard took a 1950s resort building and reworked it into something closer to a bathhouse with rooms attached. The visual language is deliberately flat and graphic — bold blocks of colour, mid-century lines left intact, signage treated as part of the design.

    The spa side of the property is the reason most people stay: hammam, plunge pools, and a long stretch of bayfront lawn facing west, which is the correct orientation for the evening. Rooms are simple by comparison, and intentionally so.

    Belle Isle, Biscayne Bay1950s building reworkedBathhouse and spa focus
  3. 03

    Chateau Voltaire

    Paris, France

    A short walk from the Palais-Royal, Chateau Voltaire occupies a cluster of joined buildings on rue Saint-Roch — a site that was assembled rather than designed, and reads that way in the best sense. The interiors lean dark: stone, brass, heavy textiles, and furniture chosen piece by piece instead of ordered as a scheme.

    It is small, and the scale is the point. A bar and restaurant sit on the ground floor, the courtyard is tucked out of sight from the street, and the 1st arrondissement's galleries and arcades begin more or less at the door.

    1st arrondissement, rue Saint-RochDark, collected interiorsBar and restaurant on site