I guess…I guess have a weakness for hotel chains that are weirdly specific.
Brent and I are planning a trip to Bentonville to see the newly-expanded Crystal Bridges for later this year, and of course, I want to stay at the 21C Museum Hotel again. These are among my favorites in general, not so much because the rooms themselves are incredible in any certain way, but it does feel like you’re having Night at the Museum because the overall space literally is a museum. And it’s open all hours. So you can decide that you’d prefer to linger over the art at midnight rather than two in the afternoon. It’s a thing.
Well, I say that the rooms aren’t necessarily that special, but some of the hotels have themed rooms. In Louisville, they have “Asleep in the Cyclone” which is built as an installation by artists Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe.
Some of the 21Cs have been rebranded. Right now, the 21Cs are:
From a 2014 visit: Yoan Capote’s In Tran/sit, above. And below, Virginie Barre’s Fat Bat which overlooks things in the fitness room
Does Fat Bat literally hovering over guests in the exercise room seem a bit heavy (sigh) – handed in the messaging
From a 2016 visit, Werner Reiterer’s outdoor chandelier; Astrid Krogh’s Lightmail
From a 2023 visit, the Durham location is especially nice because you can just go hang out in the bank vault:
art-wise, Vibha Galhotra’s Earth 1978 was on view
From a 2019 visit, the red Lincoln limousine out front; Daniel Jackson’s The Thousand Yard Stare; Virgil Marti’s Landscape Wallpaper; a terrible pic I took of Anne Peabody’s Wheel of Fortune
and I think that means I’ve been to all but St Louis.
When the boys were little, they loved the 21C penguins — each hotel had its signature color penguin — and you could move them around the hotel as you wish. That green one? He’s with us.
21Cs that have been rebranded include Chicago, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, and the one in Nashville that we stayed at in 2018 (sidenote: Nashville needs a TON more hotels because 1/ they’re mostly super cookie-cutter and by that I mean especialllyyyy the nicest ones and 2/ they’re so expensive for what they are):
Below — Paul Rucker’s Soundless; George Legrady’s At the Bar; Maynard Monrow’s Self-Portrait
And this is the Sanctuary 21 Artist Suite that could be booked — it was designed by Sebastiaan Bremer and Josephine Wiggs, and included a recording studio:
There was a time when I wanted to visit every one of the 21Cs, and I think it would be fun to visit St Louis just to check all those boxes (I really hardly ever get to STL, though — I think twice in the last ten years, once doing part of Route 66 and the other was last year to do a college tour of Wash U). I used to also want to visit all of the Graduate Hotels just because they’re so immersive, especially when they used to be designed by Andrew Alford, and there was more like a dozen of them, but they’ve been purchased by Hilton and they’re up to 35 locations now.
What other ultra-themed hotels with a few locations do you know that might be fun to visit? Please lemme know. xoxo