Art Hotels

This was the Central Post Office, finished in 1912 and built at the scale that public mail once needed: heavy masonry, deep window reveals, and a formal front that reads as civic rather than commercial. The conversion kept the ceremonial staircase, so the first thing a guest meets is a piece of the old building rather than a new insertion. Much of the original stonework remains legible from the street.

Long wings fold around an inner courtyard, so guest corridors run as straight lines and the yard gives daylight to the inner faces. The kept staircase still works as the formal way up. Rooms follow the depth of the old postal floors, so their proportions come from the sorting halls.

The building stands beside Copenhagen Central Station, with the Tivoli gardens on the other side of the tracks. This is the part of the city where long-distance trains, buses and the airport line arrive, so the surroundings are transport before anything else.

Marcel Breuer designed the building in 1970 as the Armstrong Rubber headquarters, and it has stayed close to what he drew. Two concrete volumes stand apart with a bridge between them, so the mass reads as a gap held open rather than as one slab. The elevation is made of repeated precast window modules, each one framed deeply enough to throw a shadow, which gives the surface its texture.

Two separate volumes carry the accommodation, and the bridge between them makes the plan work as one house. Guest floors sit inside the repeating concrete modules, so each room is bounded by the same structural bay. Circulation crosses the void instead of running around it, and the ground level stays open beneath.

The site sits beside Interstate 95 on the edge of New Haven, in a stretch of retail sheds and industrial land near the harbour. The city centre and Yale lie inland, a short drive north, and the building is visible from the motorway.

The house was built in 1889 as the headquarters of Dresdner Bank, and it still carries itself that way: cut stone, a wide symmetrical front, and window openings sized to impress people who were being asked to trust the place with money. The conversion left the heavy structure alone and worked inside it. What was once the underground vault now holds the swimming pool and the spa.

Below ground the old strongroom sets the shape of the wellness floor, so its ceiling height and thick walls are the ones the bank built. Above it the banking hall gives the public rooms their span. Guest corridors follow the bank's structural rhythm, which puts rooms behind the same regular openings.

The address is Bebelplatz in Mitte, a square framed by the opera house, the old library and the university. Unter den Linden runs past one side, and the museum island lies a few minutes east on foot.

Nine separate houses from the medieval old town were joined to make this hotel, and the seams were not hidden. Each house kept its own front on the lane, so from outside the address reads as a row rather than as a building. Inside, timber, plaster and stone from different centuries meet within a few steps of each other.

Because nine houses were built separately, their floors never lined up, and the plan absorbs that: short flights and ramps step between levels wherever two houses meet. Passages run through party walls instead of along one spine, so the way to a room bends. Every house contributes rooms of its own proportion.

The hotel sits in the Rennweg quarter of Zurich's old town, a grid of narrow lanes above the Limmat. The river, the main shopping street and the lake end are all a short walk away, and the lanes stay largely free of cars.

The lodge dates from 1950 and stays low against the ground, which is the point of it. It stands on a rock terrace above Lake Villarrica, with timber, stone and long horizontal glazing doing most of the work. Rather than rise, the building spreads along the shelf of rock it was given, and the roofline follows the slope so that from below the lodge reads as part of the terrace.

Rooms are laid out in one row along the terrace, every one facing the lake, with the corridor behind them on the hill side. That single-loaded plan is why the building is so long and thin. Public rooms sit where the terrace widens, and gardens step down in front.

The lake is Villarrica, and the Villarrica volcano stands across it, usually in view from the terrace. The town of Pucón is a few minutes along the shore road, with the national park and the hot springs beyond it inland.