Coolest Hotel Lobbies

The 26-room La Purificadora in Puebla’s historic city center has clear echoes of its past as a 19th-century water-bottling facility—nowhere more so than in its stunning open-air lobby. Renowned Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta kept a portion of the original façade intact (including a masonry stone wall and arched gate) and fashioned a dramatic black volcanic stone staircase with a stream of water running down its middle. Legorreta also celebrates Puebla’s Catholic heritage: the sofas are a bold bishop purple.

When Ian Schrager enlisted friend and artist Julian Schnabel to re-create the public spaces in the 185-room Gramercy Park Hotel, what he got was a far departure from the slick, ironic style of his previous properties. Instead, Schnabel’s vision was personal and textured; the lobby features a rotating collection of impressive 20th-century art—works by Twombly, Basquiat, Hirst, and of course, Schnabel’s own—mixed with Moroccan-tiled floors, hand-carved fireplaces, and a custom Venetian glass chandelier.

With its super-raw industrial look and modern trimmings, this 19-room hotel in the Shiliupu dockyard district mimics Shanghai’s old-new dichotomy. For its three-story-high lobby, architects Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu kept the original 1930s warehouse concrete walls intact, added new steel columns and beams, and for a touch of anachronistic elegance, suspended a grand white paper chandelier designed by Studio Job for Moooi.

Designer Kelly Wearstler is known for favoring high-drama color schemes, but she chose a more subdued palette for the lobby of the 166-room Viceroy Anguilla. “I wanted it to be rich and dark as a respite from the sun,” says Wearstler, who based the lobby’s browns and grays off of beach finds like driftwood and oyster shells. Her fluid-seeming copper-and-brass ceiling light fixture was inspired by another beach item: seaweed.

Hotelier André Balazs channeled mid-century corporate cool years before Don Draper became a household name. For the spacious two-story lobby of this enduring 205-room hot spot, design elements left over from the building’s 1950s tenant Superior Oil (a 15-time-zone clock, green marble floors) blend with new touches, like evocative olive ash burl wall panels and 150-foot-long hot pink Omnibus sofas by modernist master Vladimir Kagan.

Visionary Dutch designer Marcel Wanders’s first hotel in the U.S. had to be over-the-top fantastical. Taking Sleeping Beauty’s castle as inspiration, he achieved just that in the 335-room hotel, with outsized lobby features like an ornate laser-cut black steel staircase, brass bell-shaped lights, and bright white Baroque-inspired plaster columns.

With Gaudí masterpieces like Casa Milà (“La Pedrera”) and Casa Battló, Barcelona’s main thoroughfare, Passeig de Gràcia, has no shortage of architectural stunners. This 98-room hotel is one of its newest entrants, housed in a converted mid-century bank building that now boasts a soaring white atrium and floating “catwalk” leading up to its cream-and-gold-colored lobby. Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola plays with light and space with sliding crystal doors, mirrored ceilings, and intricate latticework.

The Four Seasons had the prescience to meticulously restore this 1906 Art Nouveau landmark, previously an apartment complex during Hungarian Communist rule. The 179-room property is now one of the hotel group’s grandest, and its magnificent lobby the centerpiece with stained-glass windows and a soaring glass cupola from which hangs a custom-designed chandelier created from hundreds of hand-shaped crystal leaves. The lobby’s flooring is just as ornate: it’s covered with 1,021,200 mosaic tiles.

Giorgio Armani's debut in the hotel world occupies 10 floors in the Burj Khalifa, which, at 2,716 feet, stands as the world’s tallest building. The 160-room property’s curved lobby atrium has four interlocking steel arches that rise almost 40 feet against a refined backdrop of creams and grays. But it’s just for show (and a grand one at that); reception takes place in guest rooms with a “lifestyle manager”—think full-time personal concierge, dressed, of course, in Armani.

Two French hospitality heavyweights, former Club Med chief executive Serge Trigano and legendary designer Philippe Starck, paired up to turn a dilapidated parking garage in the far-from-charming 20th Arrondissement into an impossibly hip 172-room hotel. Starck’s whimsical design touches are on full display in the lobby, from the gold-and-silver tree-stump stools and curtains dotted with four-leaf clovers and floating eyes to the chalkboard ceiling covered with phrases and diagrams.