Art Hotels: six hotels

Live playing belongs to the running of the house rather than to a programme sold on the side. In the bar, evening after evening, a fiddle or a set of pipes or a singer starts up, and the drinking room turns towards the sound. People from the village come in alongside guests, and the house makes no distinction.

It happens in the public bar on the ground floor at Braemar, in upper Deeside, a room with a fire, a counter and no platform of any kind. Players stand wherever there is space to stand. Upstairs the house is hung with art, but this room is plain, and it is where the noise is.

For those hours the building is a village pub that happens to have bedrooms above it. Guests who came for the collection end up in the same room as people who walked down the street, and the house stops behaving like a destination.

Nobody is served at set sittings. The kitchen is open through the day, food sits out, and guests take what they want, ask for something else, or stand and talk to whoever is cooking. Eating is not an occasion with a beginning and an end; it is the ordinary traffic of the house.

Ett Hem is a converted townhouse in Lärkstaden, a quiet residential district of Stockholm, and the kitchen is a working kitchen at the heart of it, with a table standing in it. The conservatory and the garden open off the same floor, so people carry plates between the three of them all day.

Because there is no dining room, there is no front of house and no back. Guests cross the working kitchen daily, staff and visitors share one table, and the building keeps the manners of a home instead of those of a hotel.

Neighbours use this building. The coffee bar, the reading corner and the terrace on the ground floor are open to the street, so people come in to work, to read and to meet without ever staying upstairs. The same faces turn up day after day, and hotel guests are simply part of the crowd.

The house is a nineteenth-century block on Gran Via in Eixample, Barcelona, with tiled floors and tall doors at pavement level. The coffee bar sits beside the entrance, books line one wall of the reading corner, and the planted terrace above the street carries the same trade in warm weather.

The ground floor is never empty and never reserved for residents. A guest coming down the stairs joins a room already in use by the city, so the building reads as a piece of the neighbourhood with beds above it.

Guests walk down from the house to the sea, swim off the rocks, and eat at the water's edge before climbing back up. The route is short and it is always the same route, and most people take it on every day of a stay. It is the shape of the day here rather than an outing.

The hotel stands above the sea at Porto Ercole, on the Monte Argentario promontory in Tuscany, and the ground drops in terraces towards a rocky shore. There is no sand anywhere below it. A lift and a path lead down to the pool, to the flat rocks and to tables set close against the water.

The main house empties in the middle of the day and fills again later. The weight of the place moves down the cliff and back up it, so the building works as the head of a route rather than as the place where people sit.

Two habits run together once the light goes. The bar fills, and people take a turn through the building to look at what hangs in it, including the sculpted room built into the front of the house. Guests do both within the same hour, glass in hand, without anybody organising it for them.

The hotel occupies a nineteen-twenties block on a garden square in Mayfair, London. The bar is a dark panelled room off the lobby, and the art is spread through corridors and public rooms rather than gathered into one place, so looking at any of it means walking the building itself.

The public rooms stay in use late, and the corridors are more than a way to a bedroom. A guest crossing the lobby is likely to stop twice before reaching the stairs, which slows the whole house down.

Anyone may sit here. The library of the old brewhouse, with its shelves of books, and the sitting rooms around it stay open through the day, and people come in to read, to work and to wait. Guests share the chairs with residents of the district who never go upstairs at all.

Hotel Emma is the converted brewhouse of the Pearl Brewery on the San Antonio River Walk, in Texas. Cast-iron machinery was left standing where it was, and the library sits under old vaults with pipes and tanks overhead. The river path runs past the doors and brings the traffic in with it.

The ground floor works as a public room of the district, so the building keeps the openness it had when it was a works. It is entered from the street all day, and staying here means living above something the city already uses.