Art Hotels

The Daniele family built this palazzo in 1861, in a quiet town near the heel of Italy. Francesco Petrucci, the family's last descendant, turned it into a hotel with the entrepreneur Gabriele Salini. There are only a handful of suites.

Restoration kept what mattered. Frescoed ceilings and patterned tile floors stay in place. Around them, the rooms are close to bare, and that restraint is the point: contemporary pieces from the owner's collection get the walls to themselves. Outside, a garden of orange trees, a pool and a run of open courtyards. The coast at Santa Maria di Leuca is a short drive south.

• 1861 palazzo
• Contemporary art collection
• Courtyard garden
• Southern Salento

Endsleigh began around 1810 as a rustic lodge for the Duke and Duchess of Bedford. Jeffry Wyatville designed the building. Humphry Repton laid out the grounds, and his landscape above the River Tamar is now counted among England's finest.

Olga Polizzi opened it as a hotel in 2005. Her approach is layered, not showy. Paintings, old furniture and quiet colour fill rooms that still feel like a private home. Walk far enough and you reach grottoes, a shell-lined folly and long views down the valley. Fishing on the Tamar goes back to the lodge's first purpose.

• Regency cottage orné
• Humphry Repton landscape
• River Tamar
• Country hotel

Casa Cook Samos sits right on the beach at Potokaki, near the old harbour town of Pythagoreio. It is adults-only. The mood is slow and low-rise.

Why an art hotel? Because the whole place is treated as a composition. Plaster, linen, clay and raw wood carry the design, and handmade objects take the place of decoration. Some suites open straight onto shared or private pools. Look up from the sand and the hills of Samos fill the view; turn around and the Aegean does.

• Adults only
• Beachfront
• Swim-up suites
• Eastern Aegean