15 designer hotels you can book now

The last survivor of the hotels designed by the master and forerunner of Organic Architecture is a "Prairie House" style building with brick and terracotta fronts and a projecting flat roof, adjacent to the National City Bank building (also designed by Wright). After ups and downs and decades of neglect, the building was renovated in 2011 and is now recognised as a valuable architectural gem not only for the Iowa town.

Not far from Palm Springs, The Desert Hot Springs Motel (aka The Lautner Compound) was designed by Lautner as an accommodation prototype for a vast urban expansion plan. The four interconnected independent units, surrounded by native vegetation, with their rough but elegant atmospheres still offer an immersive experience of the desert and the Californian modernist language.

Realized in the 2000s within the Unité d'Habitation, the hotel, which occupies two floors with its 21 rooms of different types, is the only one in Marseilles housed in a UNESCO World Heritage building. Functional and figurative characteristics have been carefully preserved, as well as the affordable costs, in line with the original living philosophy of the project. 

The building, Copenhagen's first skyscraper, was designed as a hotel and terminal for the SAS airline company and as a symbol of a new era of economic prosperity. The work consists of a parallelepiped volume floating on a horizontal plate, defined by continuous glass facades and light metal grids. The hotel interiors were also meticulously designed by Arne Jacobsen.

The building, one of the first design hotels in the world, is the result of the transformation of an eighteenth-century building (the ancient Poggio del Conte di Siracusa) immersed in a centuries-old park and overlooking the Gulf; here, Ponti adopted a sober language that blurs architecture into the rocky landscape. Inside, the decorative motifs of ceramic tiles on the floors and white and blue pebbles set into the walls evoke seascapes. A renovation, necessary to meet the requirements of a luxury hotel, was conducted from 1999 to 2004 by architect Fabrizio Mautone.

Hotel Nacional Rio, a modernist glass, aluminium and concrete building in the seafront neighbourhood of São Conrado, was the most innovative hotel in Latin America by the time of its opening: 108 metres high and spread over 34 floors, it housed a conference centre for 2,800 people and a theatre for around 1,400 spectators, five restaurants, an air taxi service from its heliport and a collection of original sculpturess and different artworks. The hotel went through a season of oblivion after closing in 1995 but was restored and reopened in 2017.

Hotel Il Palazzo was one of the first boutique hotels in Japan. Situated on the edge of a canal, the 62-room building stands on a stone base and rises seven storeys high, with a monumental façade punctuated by a tight rhythm of amber-coloured travertine columns and copper lintels. The recent renovation aimed at preserving and enhancing the original language of Aldo Rossi. 

The hotel, located at 1,500 m above sea level and accessible only by cable car, blends into the landscape following the contours of the mountains and blurs the boundaries between architecture and nature through natural materials (from larch wood to natural stone, clay and glass) that give the complex a rustic yet refined character. The Vigilius has also been conceived as a sustainability manifesto: it is Italy's first Klimahaus-A certified hotel. 

The particularity of this five-star hotel is the plurality of prestigious authors who have designed, each according to their own language, the spaces on the different floors: John Pawson on the ground floor, Zaha Hadid on the first, Norman Foster on the second, David Chipperfield on the third, Plasma Studio on the fourth, Victorio and Lucchino on the fifth, Marc Newson on the sixth, Ron Arad on the seventh, Kathryn Findlay on the eighth, Richard Gluckman on the ninth, Arata Isozaki on the tenth, Javier Mariscal and Fernando Salas on the eleventh, Jean Nouvel on the twelfth and on the façade.

In the heart of the Rioja Alavesa wine region, this spectacular building with its crumpled titanium sheets and daring geometries that renounce any rule of Cartesian pattern, with 43 luxury rooms and suites stands out like a striking landmark among the historic cellars and vineyards.

The 5-star-superior hotel blends into the spectacular mountain landscape of Arosa at 1,800 metres above sea level like an explicit but discreet artificial presence: the building is distributed over four floors underground and emerges on the surface through sculptural glass structures that take in daylight and at night turn into evocative light lanterns. 

Located in a panoramic position in the Alpine scenery, the historic Dolder Grand (designed in 1899 by Jacques Gros) has been renovated and extended to accommodate a luxury urban resort whose spaces, more than doubled, are in close relationship with the surrounding forest. The work involved the revision of the interior spaces, the addition of two new glazed wings that include a spa and a ballroom, and the restoration of the exterior façades to the original red and ochre tones of the details. On the new facades, perforated aluminium screens evoke the geometry of trees.

The project envisaged the unification, through a common architectural language, of three buildings (a larger volume, a smaller one and a rectilinear body), conceived as boxes with their walls modelled, folded and incised like thin sheets. An irregular rhythmic pattern of openings animates the wooden-panel-clad elevations, creating a suggestion of lightness and permeability. 

The Morpheus brings together the multiplicity of its functional programmes (770 rooms, suites, civic spaces, meeting and event facilities, game rooms, restaurants, spa and rooftop pool) under a single sculptural shell moulded like an organic mass, pierced by large voids and encased in structural grids that evoke neural networks.

Amsterdam RAI Hotel is the main hotel of the RAI Amsterdam convention and exhibition centre and an imposing presence in the rapidly developing Zuidas business district. The building consists of three overlapping and interlocking triangular volumes with aluminium and glass fronts and houses 650 rooms (it is the largest hotel in the Benelux), restaurants, bars and live TV studios, work and entertainment spaces.