Mitch and cam artful lodgers free#

The exhibitions stretch across the entire hotel. Look up from your meal in a 21c restaurant, as I did from a dish of bison meatballs (from a herd on Wilson’s property), and you’ll find that the museum part of the stay has already started.

(“No one was serving octopus in Louisville before us,” Wilson says proudly. And fine dining is a hallmark, with menus pushing diners to expand their palates beyond local fare. Unlike most boutique chains, 21c hotels do not all look the same, but they share the same posh details and playful spirit-from gourmet chocolates on pillows and rubber duckies in the showers to the trademark flock of penguin statues in each location (moved constantly by guests and staff). Wilson and Brown’s desire for the hotels to take their place as a city’s cultural centre has kept their horizons limited (and away from megalopolises such as New York and Los Angeles). Within the next year two more 21c hotels will open-in Lexington, Kentucky and Oklahoma City-and, by 2018, another three, in Kansas City, Nashville and Indianapolis. In March a hotel opened in Durham, North Carolina, 125 rooms in a 17-storey Art Deco tower (designed by the same architects who built the Empire State Building, which the hotel resembles). That location broke with convention and went into a custom-built building. A conversation with the couple’s friend Alice Walton led to a third 21c in Bentonville, Arkansas, near Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Mitch and cam artful lodgers free#

Living large: Galleries are free to the publicĪ second 21c opened five years later in Cincinnati, 156 rooms inside the once grand (and now grander) Metropole Hotel. “It wasn’t long after it opened that we had this tremendous response, and friends and advisors”-a group who had originally pleaded with them not to try this concept at all-“began to say, ‘You really ought to do more of these. “We were only planning on doing the one in Louisville,” Wilson says of the 91-room flagship, where rooms start at $229 a night. Anyone can visit the galleries (free of charge) at any time, though guests, naturally, have the truest 24/7 access to the exhibitions. As with the nude nymphs at check-in, the pieces are purposefully unconventional and unconventionally displayed. As conceived by art collectors and philanthropists Steve Wilson and Laura Lee Brown-he a former political operative, she a Brown-Forman heiress-the hotels are often in historic buildings, gracefully reimagined by New York architect Deborah Berke, and feature museums filled with a permanent collection of art as well as temporary shows. After all, a night at this hotel is truly a night at a museum.įounded in 2006, 21c Museum Hotels combine provocative contemporary art (the name refers to the 21st century) and luxurious lodging in areas of the country that are typically flown over. The fact that they’re statues by contemporary artist Judy Fox doesn’t make the scene any less disturbing, and that’s exactly the point behind having these shameless sprites at check-in. Rooms with viewings: Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson keep a penthouse above the flagship 21c Hotel in Louisville that’s available to guestsįour naked children are playing behind the front desk at the 21c Museum Hotel in Louisville when I arrive.