Art Hotels

• Converted grain mill
• Puerto Madero waterfront
• Theatre and cabaret room
• Riverside pool garden

Faena occupies a red-brick grain mill on the eastern edge of Puerto Madero, a dock district that spent most of the twentieth century emptying out and most of the twenty-first filling back in. The shell is industrial and the interior is emphatically not: the conversion was handled as a single authored gesture, with deep crimson, gilt, mirror and heavy drapery running from the entrance corridor through to the restaurant. Whether that reads as theatrical or as excessive is a matter of taste, but it is unmistakably one person's idea carried the full length of the building.

Rooms sit behind that public drama and are calmer than it suggests — white, high-ceilinged, with tall windows facing either the dock water or the city behind. The property keeps a cabaret room and a theatre space in regular use, which means the ground floor has a rhythm that shifts across the evening rather than simply emptying after dinner. A long pool garden runs along the water side, screened by planting.

The location suits walkers. The ecological reserve begins a short distance south, the restored dock warehouses run north, and the older centre of the city is reachable on foot in about half an hour.

• Former savings bank
• Norra Vallgatan, old town edge
• Marble banking hall lobby
• Nordic material palette

The Malmö Nobis took over a nineteenth-century savings bank on Norra Vallgatan, facing the canal that separates the old town from the central station. Bank buildings convert unusually well, and this one kept its best asset: a tall banking hall with stone floors and a coffered ceiling, now working as lobby, bar and breakfast room at different hours of the day.

The design language is Nordic and restrained — pale oak, brushed brass, grey and green stone, wool in the soft furnishings — and the contrast with the heavy historic masonry is the point. Guest rooms are quiet and tightly detailed rather than large, with joinery doing most of the work that decoration would do elsewhere. Several look straight across the water.

Practically, it is one of the easier central addresses in the city: the station is a few minutes on foot, which also puts the Copenhagen train within reach, and Malmö's compact old quarter starts immediately behind the building.

• 1950s Sanderson wallpaper headquarters
• Fitzrovia
• Enclosed courtyard garden
• Surrealist furniture pieces

Sanderson was built in the 1950s as the headquarters and showroom of a wallpaper and fabric company, and the bones of that building — a glazed curtain wall, a light internal courtyard — survived the conversion into a hotel largely intact. The interior that was dropped into it went the other way entirely: a long white lobby, sheer curtains in place of walls, and a scattering of surrealist furniture pieces that are quoted more often than they are sat on.

The courtyard is the quiet argument for the place. It is fully enclosed, planted, and invisible from the street, which in central London is rare enough to justify the walk through the lobby on its own. Rooms are pale and deliberately under-furnished, with mirrors used structurally rather than decoratively.

Fitzrovia puts Oxford Street a few blocks south and the British Museum a similar distance east, but the immediate streets are lower and calmer than either — mostly small restaurants, media offices and the occasional surviving showroom.