Interior Design.(The Good Life)(hotel interior and collections)

Byline: Zachary Kussin

It used to be that a hotel was simply a place to stay to recover from a tiring day of museum-hopping. But a number of hotels offer spectacular indoor gallery space of their own for displaying surprising collections of works that can include everything from old masters to avant-garde sculpture.

Hong Kong's Langham Place hotel owns a collection of more than 1,500 pieces, all created by artists from China and spread throughout the hotel by theme. The lobby is dedicated to sculpture, including Jian Shuo's ironic Red Guard: Going Forward! Making Money! and Yin Hong's Meditation; the seventh and eighth floors are devoted to pieces that convey celebration, such as Exercise by Pei Jing. Free guided 30-minute tours of the collection are available to hotel guests and outside visitors. Then they can satisfy their appetites at one of the hotel's five restaurants, which emphasize using fresh local ingredients in creating masterpieces of European, Cantonese and Japanese cuisine (hongkong.langhamplacehotels.com/en/).

The public art gallery inside the Semiramis Hotel in Athens features such works as the Jeff Koons's ...