Beyond the white cube: the rise of art-led hospitality

Happy New Year to everyone reading The Stellar Club today. I’m just coming out of the festive haze and gearing up for one of the most exciting trips I’ve ever taken—but more on that very soon. I spent the holidays in Switzerland with family and friends, which of course also meant spending a lot of time around art. I always tell myself I want to do an “art detox,” but if I’m honest, that feels entirely incompatible with my destiny.

Somewhere between Christmas and New Year’s I made it to the opening of the Giacometti exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in St. Moritz—wonderful, as expected. Afterwards, just a couple of villages away, we sipped wine and nibbled on local cheeses and charcuterie while admiring a beautifully renovated 15th-century Engadine house full of art: Chesa Marchetta, Hauser & Wirth’s (Artfarm’s) latest hospitality venture. A few days later I returned for lunch and saw it again in daylight, and I have to say—it’s just as charming. Over coffee with friends, we found ourselves talking about everything the group has built over the years, which led to a simple question: is this setting a new template for the art world and does it make sense?

Chesa Marchetta

What began in 1992 as a Zürich gallery founded by Iwan and Manuela Wirth together with Ursula Hauser has quietly become something far more ambitious—an art-fuelled lifestyle empire that folds in architecture, gardening, food, regional revitalisation, and now a growing constellation of boutique hotels. Most galleries add square footage. Hauser & Wirth added an entire universe.

From a Zürich Gallery to Something Much Bigger

They opened their first gallery in Zürich, expanded to London and New York, and somewhere along the way realised that the white cube was too small for what they wanted to build. The real pivot came in 2014 with Hauser & Wirth Somerset: a rural farm transformed into an art centre, a garden, a farm-to-table restaurant, a bar, a shop, and even an art-filled guesthouse. That Somerset experiment went on to give birth to Artfarm, the hospitality company the Wirths built alongside the gallery.

Since then, the expansion into hospitality has been both relentless and precise. There’s The Fife Arms in the Scottish Highlands, a 46-room hotel filled with more than 16,000 artworks and antiques. There’s the newly opened Chesa Marchetta in Sils Maria, a 15th-century Engadine house that took seven years—seven—to renovate into a quietly elegant 13-room art hotel. Another hotel is already underway in nearby Zuoz, suggesting the Engadine may soon mirror Somerset as a Hauser & Wirth cultural micro-region. Their restaurants have multiplied in parallel: Manuela in Los Angeles and New York, Mount St. in London, the revived Audley pub, Roth Bar & Grill and Da Costa in Somerset, and Cantina in Menorca, set among olive trees on Illa del Rei.

And now Sicily. The announcement of a new Hauser & Wirth location in Palermo’s Palazzo Forcella De Seta—a waterfront palazzo heavy with history—feels entirely on brand. Once again, the gallery isn’t just opening a space to show art; it’s inserting itself into the cultural fabric of a place.

Why Hospitality Works Where the White Cube Falls Short

So why does all of this make so much sense? Because Hauser & Wirth understands something most galleries consistently overlook: the art world isn’t really about objects. It’s about experiences and truly being with art. It’s about belonging, atmosphere, memory, and the slow magic of time well spent with art. You can’t build that in a twenty-minute viewing on the Upper East Side. But you can build it over a weekend at The Fife Arms, or after lunch at Cantina on a Menorcan island, or wandering through a garden in Somerset.

Hospitality deepens relationships with existing clients, who suddenly find themselves inside an ecosystem where art is the connective tissue and everything else—food, rooms, landscape—extends the brand’s emotional reach. At the same time, it attracts new audiences who would never intentionally walk into a blue-chip gallery but will happily encounter contemporary art if it’s part of their holiday, their dinner plan, or their hotel stay. Hospitality softens the intimidation factor and converts curiosity into engagement through immersion rather than salesmanship.

Is Anyone Else Doing This? Not Really.

A few have flirted with the idea. Galleria Continua operates a countryside art campus in France, but no hotels. Pace has a café in Seoul. Gagosian has experimented with restaurant partnerships. Perrotin has played with the café-concept-store hybrid. But these gestures feel cosmetic compared to Hauser & Wirth’s fully integrated approach. No one else has committed to hospitality as cultural infrastructure.

The barriers explain why. Hospitality is capital-intensive, operationally complex, painfully slow, and absolutely unforgiving. Most galleries don’t want to be landlords, employers of chefs, or developers of centuries-old buildings. Most don’t have the patience. And very few have the taste required to make hospitality feel like culture rather than branding.

What Comes Next: Art, Travel, and Cultural Hybrids

Still, I’m convinced we’ll see more of this in the future—perhaps not in the exact Hauser & Wirth / Artfarm model, but driven by the same impulse to connect art with hospitality, experience, and place. We’re already seeing early versions: hotel partnerships with galleries, sculpture trails tied to resorts, cultural residencies hosted by boutique hotels. The intersection of boutique hotels and art probably deserves its own article, and I’ll come back to it in future posts. For now, here are a few examples that have firmly landed on my art bucket list:

Château La Coste in Provence is a vineyard turned open-air museum, with permanent works by Louise Bourgeois, Richard Serra, and Ai Weiwei, paired with multiple restaurants and a luxury hotel. It’s not gallery-led, but it proves the same point: art plus landscape plus hospitality is a powerful gravitational force.

In Lisbon, MACAM combines a contemporary art museum with a five-star hotel inside an 18th-century palace. As the Financial Times put it rather perfectly: forget the museum café—this gallery has its own hotel.

And then there’s Benesse House in Naoshima, Japan, a hybrid of museum and hotel where guest rooms sit alongside serious contemporary art. I’ll be reporting from Naoshima very soon—although, frustratingly, only for a day and without staying overnight.

Gagosian collaborates with Metropolitan Opera’s Gallery Met. Gagosian partnered with one of the world’s most established cultural institutions to curate contemporary art projects inside the opera house itself. Gallery Met places major artworks by living artists into the Met’s public spaces.