Art Hotels

COMO Shambhala Estate sits above the Ayung River outside Ubud, on a slope thick enough with trees that you hear the water long before you see it. Guests stay in one of a handful of residences rather than a single block of rooms. Each residence has its own character, its own small sitting area, and its own set of stairs cut into the hillside.

The design work here is architectural rather than curatorial. There is no gallery wing. What the estate offers instead is a sequence of timber, stone and open-sided spaces arranged so that nearly every room looks into the valley. Cheong Yew Kuan's buildings follow the terrain instead of flattening it, which is why the walk from one pavilion to breakfast involves so many steps.

Programming leans toward the residential side of wellness: consultations, movement, long treatments, food that matches whatever plan a guest has agreed to. None of it is compulsory. Plenty of people book the estate simply because it is quiet and beautiful and the staff leave you alone when you want to be left alone.

The Salzburg Sacher faces the river, directly across from the old town, with the fortress rising behind the rooftops opposite. That view is the hotel's oldest asset and the reason the building has held its position since the nineteenth century, when it opened under a different name.

Inside, the art is not decoration bought by the square metre. The Gürtler family has collected for generations, and paintings, drawings and period furniture are distributed through the public rooms and corridors in a way that feels accumulated rather than installed. Individual guest rooms differ noticeably from one another — some are panelled and heavy, some lighter, few are interchangeable.

Service here is formal in the Austrian sense: correct, unhurried, and slightly old-fashioned about detail. The café serves the cake the name is attached to. During festival season the lobby fills with musicians and audiences, and the hotel becomes, briefly, a piece of the programme itself.

Six Senses Ibiza occupies the northern end of the island, at Cala Xarraca, well away from the resort strip most visitors picture. The site is rocky, low-built and painted in the terracotta and chalk tones that the north of Ibiza has used for a long time.

Art runs through the property as an ongoing programme rather than a permanent hang. The hotel invites makers to stay and work, and pieces from those residencies turn up in the public areas, the gardens and occasionally the rooms. Because the roster changes, two visits a year apart will not show the same collection.

The rest of the operation supports that: a farm, a bakery, a wellness building that takes its own programme seriously, and sunsets off the western rocks that the bar staff schedule around. Music matters here, but it is closer to a listening room than a club.