Thursday's Art Meets Hotels

Ever since the San Francisco Art Institute opened in 1871,  only two decades after the Gold Rush, San Francisco has been a destination for artists and art lovers.  When visitors demand a high esthetic from their lodging it is only natural that hotels rise to the occasion.

There is certainly artistic merit in the design of the hotels themselves, in the form of architecture.  Goethe once referred to architecture as "frozen music."  Early pioneers in architecture like Julia Morgan and architect Charles Peter Weeks and engineer William Peyton Day  (Yes, their firm was known as Weeks and Day) gave some of San Francisco's most iconic hotels their unique look.  Morgan's Fairmont Hotel and the Weeks/Day 's Mark Hopkins Hotel are usually the only hotels anyone ever heard of and certainly most recognizable.

John Portman was one of the 20 century's most prominent architects.  His unique design of the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero, with its 17 story hollowed out interior-atrium, is so iconic that is has been seen in movies such as High Anxiety, Time After Time, and the Towering Inferno.

Probably the most storied representation of the marriage of art and hotels can be found at Maxfield's in the Palace Hotel.  Named for famed artist and illustrator Maxfield Parrish his iconic painting, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, has been hanging over the bar and gazing at customers since 1909.

Since the 1990s the city, through various likeminded departments like SFTravel and the SF Arts Council, sought to place pieces from local artists into hotel lobbies and rooms.  A good example of this melding of hotels and art is the letter G-theme at the Hotel G, and conceived by local artist Richard Wright from the Creativity Explored Center. 

Creativity Explored provides studio space for artists who have special needs, or as their website proclaims," We are a studio in San Francisco that partners with artists with developmental disabilities to celebrate and nurture the creative potential in all of us."  Now CE's artists' works can be found in the lobby of the LinkedIn headquarters, and many other lobbies around the city as well as the Hotel G.

Mission Bay, San Francisco's newest neighborhood, is where the Luma Hotel is found and in their lobby is a three-story instillation which can be viewed from different angles.   It is designed by  Jim Campbell, whose more prominent Day for Night crowns the top of the Salesforce Tower and has nothing to do with the 1973 film of the same name by François Truffaut.

The Hotel Zeppelin features a life-sized sculpture of a woman with wild hair prominently placed in the lobby, and designed by artist Brian Mock from 100% recycled materials.  Antonio Mora's portrait of iconic rock diva Grace Slick, gazes over the lobby. 

Ironically, I was the chief concierge of the Donatello Hotel, which happened to be right next door to the Hotel Zeppelin.  And though it was not particularly asthenic in its design, it's theme was the Italian Renaissance, and featured Tavertine marble, originating from the same quarry where many of the Renaissance-era masters found their material.

But that wasn't what made the Donatello a repository for classic art.  For 15 years I served as their chief concierge, and on the wall behind the concierge desk was an elaborate painting which was there when I started. 

I didn't know if it was from a local artist or purchased through a catalog that sells art to hotels by the square foot.  If it wasn't for the keen eye from one of my guests,  I would have never know I had been standing in front of an original Richard Diebenkorn print all that time.

Sometimes the hotels themselves are the piece of art.  The Hotel Boheme is in the heart of North Beach, our old Italian neighborhood, but North Beach is also famous for being the nadir of the Beat movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s.  Classic literary works like Jack Kerouac's On The Road, and Allen Ginzberg's Howl introduced this little working-class enclave to the world, and the Hotel Boheme embodies this history. 

The quaint and cozy rooms are named after such Beat notables as the aforementioned Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.   The Hotel Boheme is not just a Beat-themed hotel; many of those artists whose namesake hang on the doors actually lived there.  So if you staying the Allen Ginzberg suite, he probably stayed in the same room 70 years before you checked in.

For the best example of the marriage between hotels and art look no further than the Hotel Des Arts. What makes the Hotel Des Arts unique is that each of their rooms are designed by a different artist, all but three of them local.  The other three rooms are designed by French artists.  Tired of the well-established motifs of the Hilton's and Hyatt's?  At the Hotel Des Arts, no one room is the same as the other, which makes this little hotel one of the best kept secrets in the city.