Deck the Walls: Selecting the Right Art for Your Hotel
Contents
Budgets Differ for Public, Guestrooms Spaces
Cookie Cutter Customization at Chains
If you think finding art for a few walls at home is tough, try covering hundreds, even thousands, of empty walls at once. That's the challenge each time a new hotel is built or an existing one is renovated or redecorated. Along with selecting an overall interior design style and the furnishings, draperies, bedspreads and carpeting to go with it, the owner or designer faces the question of what to do with the bare walls. The answer, it turns out, has as more to do with a hotel's location and function than it does with whether the owner prefers French Impressionists over to abstract art.
"Hotels, in particular, want to represent their location and use, so a resort hotel in Miami will be distinct from a business hotel in New York, but also different from a business hotel in Miami," says Tim Zebrowski, president of Zebrowski Design Group, a Los Angeles-based interior design practice that specializes in hotels. "Art, like the other elements in the design, needs to reinforce the fundamental character of the hotel. Selecting art for one's own home is totally different, since art in your home expresses your own self and character, rather than the character of a place."
The Eden Roc Resort and Spa, a Miami Beach hotel that attracts both business groups and leisure travelers, is a recent Zebrowski client. "For the Eden Roc, we used an art consultant who presented a number of options for our review," recalls Zebrowski of the art selection process for Eden Roc's guestrooms. "All options were based upon water elements or beach elements. Final options were selected by us and presented to the hotel and they reviewed them in the context of a model room. The final artwork chosen for the guestrooms was regarded as the best compliment to the guestroom design."
Art in Eden Roc guestrooms consists of a pair of paintings by Los Angeles artist Peter Zelesky incorporating tropical foliage and fish imagery into a contemporary design. The works, which were reproduced as prints and framed and hung in each of the 349 guestrooms, echo the hotel's beachfront locale and its hip Art Deco interior and exterior design. The artwork also subtly picks up on the vibrant melon, teal, black and bamboo color scheme used in the rooms. The striking guestroom design with its contemporary artwork earned the hotel recognition as a finalist in the 1999 Gold Key Awards for Excellence in Hospitality Design.
Robert Allen, art consultant and owner of Robert Allen Fine Art in San Francisco, frequently works with interior designers in selecting art for hotels. Most recently Allen consulted on the selection of original art for the public spaces at Elk Horn Lodge, a new destination ski resort in Idaho. Rather than choose works that literally reflected the resort's mountain locale or ski resort function, Allen helped the lodge find contemporary works on canvas and paper that conveyed the sense of place in terms of light, energy and color rather than realistic imagery. "The interior design at the Elk Horn Lodge used lots of stone and leather, and the art pieces we chose reflected those colors and textures," Allen says.
Budgets Differ for Public, Guestroom Spaces
Art pieces seen in public spaces at upscale hotels are often one-of-a-kind originals. But mass-produced prints, usually offset lithographs, are almost always used in the guestrooms. "Guestroom art is usually rock bottom dollar-wise, because of the economy of scale," Allen notes. "A hotel is buying several hundred or more pieces.
"The cost of a typical framed piece in a hotel guestroom is $20-$30, with $50 being on the high end," says Allen. "Most hotels don't skimp on the public space art, though, and it's not unusual to have them spend $10,000-$15,000 on a single piece for the lobby."
The Windsor Court Hotel, an Orient-Express property in New Orleans, is famous for, among other things, the original art collection displayed in its public spaces. When the Coleman family, the hotel's original owners, built the Windsor Court in 1974, they commissioned a consultant formerly with Sotheby's and sent him on the road in Europe for two years to purchase the collection. The 16th-, 17th- and 18th-Century original art from Europe and the Orient is valued at more than $10 million today. In keeping with the rule of using more economical art in the guestrooms, elegant English horse racing prints adorn the walls of Windsor Court's guestrooms.
The Windsor Court's art choices reflect the hotel's traditional English style and its status as the city's premiere luxury hotel, just as the art in the guestrooms at International House, a new boutique hotel just a few blocks away, represents that hotel's very different character. The collection mirrors the city's creative heritage and the hotel's appeal to a younger clientele that frequently includes musicians and film crews. Owners Sean Cummings and Brooks Graham worked with local interior design firm Chrestia & Staub on the hotel's trendy look. "We pulled together the best artists and the most beautiful collection of modern jazz photography," says Cummings. Black-and-white images of musicians like Wynton Marsalis--taken by prominent New Orleans photographers--hang on the walls of the hotel's 119 guestrooms.
Cookie Cutter Customization at Chains
Chain hotels and motels, of course, usually feature more standardized interior designs. Colors, fabrics, furnishings and art, however, still depend on location and clientele. Country Inns & Suites by Carlson provides design services to its franchisees that help tailor the art to the specific hotel. "We offer a prototype interior design package that includes artwork selections broken out by location and the market served," explains Sharon Wendland, director of design, equipment and supplies for Country Inns & Suites.
Art options include a selection of framed art prints that Wendland says would be suited to a hotel located near a highway or in a suburb of a small town where most guests are leisure travelers. Images of country roads and rivers, as well as casual fruit arrangements, are among the choices. The second group of art is geared more to hotels located in urban areas that attract business travelers. This option includes horse scenes, formal fruit arrangements and images of elegant homes and gardens. A third art package is Southwestern in theme and includes prints with a Spanish Colonial flair. Franchisees are also offered the option of working with an individual interior designer to create a custom look; Wendland says about 80% of Country Inn franchisees choose this route, which is still subject to corporate review and standards. "We require a minimum of two art pieces per room, usually one over the bed and one on the opposite wall," Wendland says. "For the lobby and the breakfast area, we ask for a minimum of three pieces in each area."
Another way for hotels and design firms to select art is to use an online art gallery and consulting service. Geoff Mullen, cofounder of IncredibleArt.com, has consulted on several hotel projects since the site launched 18 months ago. "We worked with the Marriott Sonoma Valley Lodge in California and are currently working with several Hampton Inns in south Florida," says Mullen. "The Sonoma Lodge requested artists from that area of California who did vineyard landscapes for its 182 guestrooms. Since we have access on our site to 100,000 pieces of art ranging from posters to original works, we can help designers locate artists from around the world. Our site also enables a client to do very specific searches by style, artist, price point and so forth. We can even create a gallery of art choices and e-mail it directly to designers and hotels."
Angela Wibking is a Nashville-based writer specializing in business and travel. Reach her at awibking@earthlink.net.