In 1528, Baldassare Castiglione published Il Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier), a manual for navigating the refined and highly codified world of Renaissance courts. In it, he describes an essential quality that the perfect courtier must possess: a certain nonchalance, a cultivated ease that conceals the labor behind every gesture, every word, every display of talent.

Its root, sprezzare, means to despise or disregard. To practice sprezzatura is to perform a kind of visible indifference toward the very mastery you are displaying.

“Avoid affectation in every way possible. Practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does appear to be without effort.”

— Baldassare Castiglione, Il Libro del Cortegiano, 1528

II. WHERE VALUE CANNOT BE MEASURED, BEHAVIOUR BECOMES THE PROOF

Most industries rely on one thing: the number. Revenue, yield, occupancy rate, return on equity. The art world, like luxury, like certain corners of architecture and high-end advisory, does not. The question of what something is worth cannot be answered by pointing at a spreadsheet. It can only be answered by pointing at the people who have decided it is worth something.

This is the structural condition that makes sprezzatura not merely attractive in these fields, but functionally necessary. When there is no formula for value, the people who appear most comfortable with ambiguity become the de facto arbiters of it. Confidence in the absence of certainty is, in itself, a credential. And the particular form that confidence takes, unhurried, underdressed, unimpressed, is exactly what Castiglione meant.

The psychological mechanism is precise: in a market without objective pricing, the person who most visibly needs to transact is the one who loses the most in the transaction. Desire becomes a liability. And so the learned behavior is the management of visible desire, not its elimination, because total indifference reads as ignorance, but its careful rationing. You signal that you see the value. You do not signal that you need it.

III. WHY IT WORKS: THE PSYCHOLOGY

Effortlessness signals surplus. When we perceive that someone is not straining, we unconsciously register that they possess more resources than the current task requires: time, experience, social capital, financial cushion. Surplus, in social and economic terms, is one of the clearest markers of power.

Humans are acutely sensitive to signals of effort and need. When something, or someone, appears to strive too visibly, it introduces a subtle asymmetry, suggesting that value must be argued for rather than assumed. Sprezzatura, by contrast, removes the visible traces of striving and, in doing so, shifts perception.

Scarcity of desire creates desire. This is not manipulation, or rather, it is, in the same way that all social behavior involves some choreography of impression. What distinguishes sprezzatura from mere pretension is that the underlying competence is real. The effortlessness is performed; the mastery is not.

IV. THE PARADOX OF EFFORT

Here is the central irony: sprezzatura requires enormous effort to maintain. In Castiglione’s time, it required discipline, practice, and a deep internalization of the codes one was expected to navigate. Today, it demands a similar foundation. The ability to appear effortless in high-stakes environments is often built on a significant accumulation of competence, taste, and experience. Without this underlying substance, attempts at sprezzatura risk reading as an emptiness disguised as ease.

In business, the most effective practitioners share a specific quality: they are intensely deliberate in private and entirely relaxed in public. Sprezzatura is therefore an enduring strategy for operating within systems where perception, discretion, and symbolic capital matter as much as explicit declarations of value. In a cultural moment defined by overexposure and constant articulation, that restraint becomes not only elegant, but powerful.

Advice in this regard is inherently tricky. You cannot learn sprezzatura from an article about sprezzatura. The awareness that you are practicing it undermines the practice itself. What you can do is something slower and less glamorous: accumulate genuine competence, reduce your attachment to specific outcomes, and cultivate the patience of someone who has seen how most things unfold.

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But what makes it interesting is that beneath that surface is a scene that’s incredibly refined: interested collectors, world-class galleries, historic restaurants filled with masterworks, and a lifestyle that quietly integrates culture at a very high level.

It’s not loud, it’s not trying to impress you but if you know where to go, Zurich is the place to be.

1. Kronenhalle

Since 1924, friends, families, and creative professionals have gathered at the Kronenhalle in the heart of Zürich, drawn by outstanding cuisine and an atmosphere that pays homage to tradition. What makes it extraordinary, however, is not the food alone but the walls: the collection of original works by Picasso, Miró, Chagall, Matisse, and Braque that hangs throughout the dining rooms, acquired directly by the founding Zumsteg family over decades. The interior was designed by architect and designer Robert Haussmann, and the light fixtures are by Diego Giacometti, Alberto’s brother, whose bronzework is as quietly remarkable as the paintings surrounding it.

2. Le Club Lacoste – The Dolder Grand

The Dolder Grand is one of those hotels that justifies the category of grand hotel in the most literal sense with incredible tennis and golf facilities. In collaboration with Lacoste, the hotel has reimagined its tennis experience as something closer to a private club experience: a newly designed court nestled in the surrounding forest, reserved for hotel guests, spa members, and Le Club Lacoste members. So chic!

3. Pavillon Le Corbusier

A small but iconic architectural statement. This lakeside pavilion is Le Corbusier’s final project. The coloured steel panels, modular structure, and precise proportions make it less of a building and more of a manifesto. The setting, with the lake just steps away, makes it one of those rare museum visits that feels like a genuine pleasure from start to finish. Really loved strolling around.

4. Babu’s

Babu’s opened its doors with a bakery and coffeehouse concept that was new to the city, with the aim of reinventing brunch culture and making high-quality, handmade, freshly baked bread, pastries, and cakes more available. The atmosphere is cosy and vibrant, with a steady flow of creatives and locals.

5. Kunsthaus Zürich

One of the greatest art museums of Europe, the Kunsthaus holds the largest collection of Alberto Giacometti sculptures and drawings in the world, a fact alone worth the visit :)), alongside major works by Monet, Munch, Hodler, and Picasso, and a collection of Swiss art from the 18th century to the present. The 2021 extension by David Chipperfield is a significant and well-curated addition to the exhibition space.

6. The Matcha Club

Founded by Chiara Dalla Mora, a former corporate professional turned entrepreneur, The Matcha Club was born out of a genuine frustration: matcha served outside Japan was almost never prepared correctly, tasting watery or bitter, and rarely from ceremonial-grade leaves. The result is Zürich’s contemporary organic matcha bar with a minimalist, considered identity that feels entirely right for this city.

7. UB Law

An unexpected library stop in the Faculty of Law. Its elliptical wooden skeleton spirals 30 metres up to a radiant glass dome that floods the entire atrium with natural light. The quietly breathtaking interior is one of the best architectural surprises in the city.

8. Hauser & Wirth

One of the most significant contemporary art galleries in the world, with spaces in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Menorca among others, its original home is right here in Zürich, where Iwan and Manuela Wirth founded the gallery in 1992. A reminder that this city’s relationship with contemporary art runs considerably deeper than its reputation suggests.

9. La Stanza

A hot spot in the city with a creative, international, relaxed crowd. More about the energy and the people than just the drinks, though the menu selection is great!

10. The Bagel Shop

The Bagel Shop does one thing and does it properly: freshly made bagels with a yummy selection of fillings. The young, colourful space is the perfect lunch stop, not trying to be anything more than it is, and that’s exactly why it works.

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Somewhere in the jungles of Ubud, there is a tent that belongs to a cartographer. Not a real one. There is no cartographer. There never was. But the maps are hand-drawn, the instruments are worn at the edges, and the objects arranged across every surface tell a story so precisely that you find yourself believing it anyway. You unpack your bag in someone else’s fiction. And somehow, it feels more real than most places you have actually been.

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard spent much of his career trying to account for exactly this feeling. In Simulacra and Simulation (1981), he described a world in which the symbol becomes more important or authoritative than the original, essentially where authenticity is replaced by copy, and reality gives way to what he called the “hyperreal”. The fiction, he argued, does not conceal the truth. It is the truth, or at least the only version of it that registers emotionally.

Whether by instinct or intention, Bill Bensley’s hotels operate on exactly this logic.

Bensley is the Bangkok-based designer behind some of Southeast Asia’s most obsessively realized hotels—essentially properties that move in the opposite direction of universally palatable designs, toward the specific, strange, overstuffed, and sincere. His hotels are stories themselves, told through objects. And what makes those stories hold is something French theorist Roland Barthes understood long before hospitality caught up: that meaning does not live with the author. It lives with the reader. In The Death of the Author (1967), Barthes argued that a text’s unity lies in the audience, not the creator.

In that tent in Ubud, the invented cartographer is not the point. You are the point. You are the reader completing the narrative by walking through it.

This is what Bill Bensley does, and there is no one quite like him.

Capella: The Brand With No Template

To understand why Bensley’s work lands the way it does, it helps to understand who he is building for.

Some of Bensley’s most notable works fall under Capella Hotels and Resorts. Capella is not a large brand. It does not want to be. With fewer than twenty properties worldwide, it sits at the quieter, more considered end of ultra-luxury hospitality, raising the bar in the Asian market on the conviction that a hotel should feel like nowhere else on earth.

Capella Hanoi: The Opera That Never Ended

Capella Hanoi opened in 2021 inside a colonial-era building in the city’s French quarter. The property is organized around a fictional world of performers, impresarios, and traveling artists who supposedly passed through the building during Hanoi’s early twentieth-century golden age of opera. More than a thousand pieces of memorabilia populate the interiors, including costumes behind glass, playbills pinned to walls, stage props arranged as if someone just set them down. Each piece is tied to a character: invented, named, given a backstory. The objects are real. The grief of a soprano who never existed is somehow, inexplicably, present in the room. The hotel is a kind of living archive of a world that never was—and that is precisely why it lingers.

Capella Hanoi Junior Suite — Source: Capella Hotels

Capella Ubud: A Jungle of Invented Lives

If Hanoi is a stage, Ubud is an expedition.

Capella Ubud is a collection of tents and pavilions suspended in the Balinese rainforest. Each tent is built around a distinct persona—the explorer, the cartographer, the naturalist, the storyteller—with handcrafted objects, commissioned artifacts, and locally made furnishings chosen to make that identity feel genuinely inhabited. Guests arrive at a life in mid-sentence: maps half-unrolled, specimens pinned to boards, journals left open on a desk.

Capella Ubud Terrace Tent — Source: Bensley

Competitive Advantage, By Object

Bensley has been explicit that his design philosophy is not meant to please everyone: “if you try to satisfy everyone, you will only create a basic box.”

It’s a strategic position that maps onto what management theorists have spent decades trying to articulate. In his foundational 1991 paper in the Journal of Management, Jay Barney argued that sustained competitive advantage derives from resources that are valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, and non-substitutable. The VRIN framework, as it became known, is usually applied to corporate capabilities and supply chains, but it describes a Bensley property quite well. A sourced antique is valuable. A commissioned narrative built over years is rare. A thousand pieces of opera memorabilia tied to invented characters is imperfectly imitable. And no amount of capital can substitute for the accumulated curatorial decisions that produced it.

This is the commercial logic that most hotel procurement departments miss. They are optimizing for cost efficiency within a category, focusing on selecting furniture, art, and objects that hit a price point, when the actual competitive question is whether those objects can be replicated by a rival with the same budget. With this kind of thinking in mind, what emerges is a subtle though consequential shift, where the hotel becomes an opinionated environment—one whose opinion, expressed through objects, compounds into brand differentiation on the property and pricing power at the revenue management level.

An important distinction to make, however, is that not every hotel should attempt what Bensley does. Most cannot, and should not. At the ultra-luxury end of the market, where location is table stakes and service quality is assumed, the conventional levers of differentiation have largely been exhausted. What remains, and what commands the most durable pricing power, is irreproducibility. Bensley is evidence of where value can be generated when everything else has been commoditized.

The Financial Paradox

An opinionated environment, it turns out, has an accounting problem.

In standard hotel development, interiors are classified under FF&E—furniture, fixtures, and equipment—and depreciated on a fixed schedule, typically over seven to ten years. Every line item in the room is assumed to move in one direction: down.

Art breaks that assumption. And the deeper you look, the stranger it gets.

Under GAAP accounting, a curated collection sits on the books at original purchase cost, depreciating like any other FF&E asset—eventually written down to zero. In reality, well-assembled collections can hold or appreciate in value over decades, quietly moving in the opposite direction to everything else on the balance sheet. This gap between book value and fair market value—invisible on the income statement—is a real source of wealth that standard hotel accounting often cannot see.

The practical implications for owners and developers are clear. Not everything in a Bensley property appreciates—custom upholstery, soft furnishings, and lighting fixtures follow the standard FF&E depreciation curve like any other hotel interior. But within the same room, a sourced antique, a site-specific work, or a locally made artifact with genuine provenance follows an entirely different curve. The balance sheet treats them identically. Standard accounting cannot distinguish between a sofa and a piece of opera memorabilia tied to an invented character in a fictional narrative—both are written down on the same schedule, toward the same zero.

The gap between those two curves is where the mispricing lives. Art-forward properties are likely being underwritten on compressed NOI assumptions that fail to account for the pricing power a curated environment generates. RevPAR premiums driven by narrative identity and irreproducibility do not show up as a discrete line in the pro forma—they are absorbed into blended rate assumptions and treated as a function of location or brand rather than curatorial investment. The result is that at acquisition, the cap rate calculation systematically undervalues exactly the assets that drive the most durable outperformance.

The Designer Who Builds for You

Most hotels are built to be understood immediately. Bensley’s are built to be completed by you, walking through them, choosing what to believe. In turn, his properties command higher rates, resist imitation, and accumulate value in ways the balance sheet cannot see.

The reason Bensley remains genuinely difficult to replicate is not the antiques, or the memorabilia, or the hand-drawn maps. It is the understanding that a hotel is a text, where the guest—unpacking their bag in someone else’s fiction, half-believing in a cartographer who never existed—is always the reader.

Nobody else in hospitality is building for that reader. Bensley has been doing it for thirty years.

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I could not help noticing how well-dressed the tourists were, attempting the Italian ease. When travellers make the effort to genuinely blend with the spirit of a city rather than pass through, something shifts in the quality of the whole experience.

These are my favourite artsy spots around the city. The obvious icons such as Uffizi, Palazzo Pitti, Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore are implied.

1. Grotta del Buontalenti

Tucked into the Boboli Gardens behind Palazzo Pitti, the Grotta del Buontalenti, completed between 1583 and 1593, is one of the most beautiful spaces the Mannerist imagination ever produced. The same restless creative mind of Bernardo Buontalenti that conceived this grotto is also credited with inventing gelato. The interior drips with artificial stalactites, embedded shells, and frescoed figures half-emerging from the walls as though the stone itself were alive. A masterpiece that most visitors to the Boboli walk straight past.

2. Palazzo Strozzi

The grandest Renaissance palazzo in Florence, built by one of the city’s richest noble families, is also one of the best contemporary art venues in Italy. It creates genuine dialogue between historic architecture and contemporary work rather than simply using one as a backdrop for the other. The programming is consistently ambitious and internationally significant.

Currently on view is a major Mark Rothko retrospective, the largest dedicated to the American painter ever held in Italy, bringing together his iconic colour field canvases.

3. Numeroventi

A discreet address, almost residential in feeling, that has quietly become one of the most considered art and design spots in the city. Part boutique hotel and culinary space, part cultural residency, part living cultural experiment, Numeroventi resists easy categorization in the best possible way. Begin your mornings with breakfast by Sforno Bakery, part of the same group behind the hottest wine bar Il Santino, explore the current exhibition, share wine and stories at the Residence Wine Club with Table Nexus, or spend an evening with Bar Romantika’s live music.

4. La Ménagère

Concept store, restaurant, bar, flower shop, and home goods all held within a beautifully restored 19th-century space near San Lorenzo. La Ménagère understood the logic of the hybrid space before it became a formula, and it still does it better than most. The breakfast is as good as the place is beautiful which, given the setting, is saying something.

5. La Loggia Roof Bar, Palazzo Guadagni

Piazza Santo Spirito is already one of the most beautiful squares in Florence, and from the rooftop loggia of Palazzo Guadagni it becomes something else entirely. We were recommended the Margot and the Chiantishire, two of the best cocktails we have ever had, and watched the sunset change over the rooftops. Truly magical.

6. Ginori 1735

The Ginori 1735 flagship boutique is not a shop in the ordinary sense. Founded in 1735 in Doccia, just outside Florence, it is one of the oldest porcelain manufacturers in Europe. The tableware, the vases, the archive pieces reissued in new colourways all presented in the most beautiful possible way.

7. Santa Maria Novella & Santa Croce

Two of the most celebrated churches in the history of Italian art.

What I appreciate most about Santa Maria Novella is that the interior is not overloaded with frescoes, which brings full attention to the mastery of those present in the chapels and choir. The façade is one of the earliest examples of mathematical proportion applied to architecture, and the cloister is one of those quietly beautiful spaces that makes you want to stroll around. Inside, among others, you can find Masaccio’s Trinity, Ghirlandaio’s frescoed choir, and Brunelleschi’s wooden crucifix.

Santa Croce, meanwhile, is where Florence buries its great: Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, and Ghiberti all rest here beneath Giotto’s frescoed chapels. The same logic applies: not overwhelming, but what is there is extraordinary.

8. Il Santino

The hottest wine bar in Florence with the coolest crowd. A compact, perfectly curated wine list and outstanding small plates. Ideal for aperitivo or a late evening glass. Il Santino is part of the same family as trattoria Il Santo Bevitore and Sforno Bakery, three addresses that together cover every moment of the day with the same considered approach. Graphically their website is also worth a visit in itself —ilsantobevitore.com :)

9. Giunti Odeon

A historic Art Nouveau cinema, built in 1922, manages to be a movie theatre, a functioning bookshop, and one of the most atmospheric interiors in the city simultaneously. Such a hidden gem worth visiting even if you leave with nothing. Though you will not leave with nothing.

10. Antico Ristoro di Cambi & Il Latini

Restaurants in Florence encapsulate the best kind of ambiance not overly fancy or curated, yet always considered, with wooden tables, art hanging on the walls, and exceptional cuisine.

Antico Ristoro di Cambi, located in the Oltrarno, is worth every step of the walk: the bistecca Fiorentina was impeccable, the wine well chosen, and we got the coziest table. Il Latini near Santa Maria Novella feels like home. The pasta is extraordinary and the welcome genuinely warm.

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Walk into the right kind of place today a concept store, a restaurant, a wine bar and the art on the walls is rarely permanent.

I have been pleasantly impressed by places like Galerie on Sunset in LA, where artworks on display are curated, changed on a rotating basis, and quietly available for purchase while guests linger over a drink.

In New York, the Lower East Side space Colbo merges a fashion boutique, bar, vinyl shop, and exhibition space. It hosts rotating artists, DJs, designers, and pop-ups more like a cultural hangout than a store.

These places aren’t galleries in the traditional sense. But I believe they are quietly becoming the most influential art spaces especially for young emerging artists.

And the logic behind them is surprisingly simple as art consumption is starting to behave like music streaming.

The Spotify model of taste

For most of the 20th century, art functioned like owning vinyl.

Collectors bought artworks permanently. Spaces committed to a stable identity. A restaurant hung paintings once and kept them for years.

Today, taste is fluid. It updates constantly like a playlist.

Art rental programs and rotating exhibitions allow collectors, brands, and spaces to swap works regularly or eventually purchase them after living with them.

This shift reflects a broader cultural change: ownership is being replaced by access.

Spotify replaced CDs.

Airbnb replaced vacation homes.

Art rental may replace static collecting — at least for public spaces.

The new cultural intermediaries: spaces with taste

The emergence of hybrid cultural spaces are an interesting phenomenon. They function simultaneously as:

• gallery

• café/restaurant/wine bar

• concept store

• social hub

• curatorial platform

These places act as filters of taste. You don’t visit them only to buy something. You go there to understand what feels culturally relevant right now. A role historically monopolized by galleries.

From a business perspective, the model is brilliant as art provides 3 things every hospitality or retail space desperately wants:

1. Atmosphere

Art instantly gives a place cultural depth. A painting changes how people photograph the room, how long they stay, even how expensive the wine feels.

2. Built-in reasons to return

Rotating exhibitions create built-in programming. Every few months there is a reason to return, a new artist, a new opening, a new crowd.

3. Revenue without inventory risk

Through consignment or rental agreements, venues can show art without buying it outright. If it sells, the space receives a commission. If it doesn’t, the walls simply change next month.

For artists, these spaces provide something galleries often struggle with: visibility within real life. A painting above a dinner table may reach founders, collectors, fashion people, architects and people who might never walk into a gallery.

It places art inside the flow of culture rather than isolating it inside the art world.

Taste is becoming ambient

What makes these spaces interesting is that they don’t present art as something to stop and contemplate.

Instead, art becomes ambient culture.

You see it while ordering wine. While trying on a jacket. While waiting for friends. This is how taste actually spreads. Quietly through spaces.

My practice

I’m currently developing a curatorial practice focused on bringing art into commercial and hospitality environments: restaurants, concept stores, hotels, and private social spaces.

What interests me most is the intersection between two logics that are rarely considered together:

• the investment logic of art — value, provenance, collecting strategy backed by my background at Bocconi University in Milan and the Art Finance & Investment course at Sotheby’s London.

• the experiential logic of spaces — atmosphere, identity, and cultural positioning informed by my work alongside art advisor Truls Blaasmo and projects connected to Milan Design Week, Art Basel Paris, NOMAD St. Moritz, and Heavensake in Tokyo.

In other words: how art can function simultaneously as a cultural asset and as a tool for shaping environments.

If you’re developing a space and would like to explore curating art as part of its atmosphere and identity, feel free to get in touch.

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It pains me to see soulless white-light souvenir shops dotting the main streets in a city that was once the most elegant crossroads of the silk trade and a global hub for the finest exchanges between East and West.

Nevertheless, if you know where to go, Venice can still be experienced as the dreamlike, curated encounter it was always meant to be. A blend of major art institutions, hidden gems, and new openings to save for your next trip, especially with Biennale Arte 2026 in the frame.

Here’s how I like to experience Venice: slow, cherry-picked, and always with an eye for beauty.

1. Peggy Guggenheim Collection

No conversation about art in Venice begins anywhere else.

Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) was arguably one of the most important private patron of the 20th-century avant-garde. She befriended, supported, and collected works by Picasso, Dalí, Duchamp, Kandinsky, Pollock, and Ernst (whom she also married), often acquiring pieces for extraordinary sums that would become priceless.

After living in Paris and London and running her legendary gallery, she settled permanently in Venice in 1949, at Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, filled with an intimate, personal, and unique collection.

2. Punta della Dogana & Palazzo Grassi

The Pinault Collection

François Pinault, the French billionaire and founder of Kering, acquired Palazzo Grassi in 2005. Designed by Giorgio Massari in the 18th century, the palazzo was followed by a second acquisition: Punta della Dogana, the former customs house at the tip of Dorsoduro where the Grand Canal meets the Giudecca, in 2009. Together they form one of the world’s most significant private contemporary art platforms.

Both spaces were redesigned by one of my favourite architects, Tadao Ando, with his characteristic blend of concrete, light, and space brought into conversation with historic Venetian architecture.

3. Harry’s Dolci

Harry’s Bar is an institution. The birthplace of the Bellini, beloved by Hemingway, Orson Welles, and royalty too numerous to name. Harry’s Dolci, its quieter sibling on the Giudecca island, is a more discreet choice.

Take a boat across, which is part of the experience, and the arrival at the Giudecca waterfront immediately changes the atmosphere, away from the tourist press of San Marco. Harry’s Dolci shares the same Cipriani philosophy instilled by Giuseppe Cipriani, but the pace is gentler, the tables more generous, and the views are incomparably dreamy on a fine afternoon.

4. Negozio Olivetti

Right in Piazza San Marco sits one of the great jewels of 20th-century Italian design, and almost everyone walks past it without knowing.

Carlo Scarpa designed this showroom for the Olivetti typewriter company in 1958, and it remains one of the finest examples of his extraordinary craft: the way he handles stone, the floating staircase, the interplay between levels, the relationship with light and water. Scarpa was a Venetian architect who understood the city’s layered materiality better than almost anyone.

5. Aman Venice

Housed in the 16th-century Palazzo Papadopoli, Aman Venice may be one of the most beautiful hotels in the world. The ballroom with frescoes by Giambattista Tiepolo, the private garden (one of the very few in the city), the Murano glass chandeliers, the suites with their painted ceilings: it is a property that makes you understand why Venice was once the most powerful and most beautiful city on earth.

Even if you are not staying, the bar and the terrace are accessible, making it a discreet hub for the quieter conversations.

6. Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel

Palazzo Bottega Veneta

Bottega Veneta, a house whose very name means “Venetian artisanal shop” took on the guardianship of a 15th-century Gothic palazzo in Cannaregio, built between 1473 and 1479 for the Soranzo family using materials recovered from an even older Byzantine palace.

Ex-creative director Matthieu Blazy created a living cultural space for private appointments and curated experiences for the house’s most valued clients and guests.

7. Palazzo Manfrin

Anish Kapoor Foundation

Anish Kapoor’s relationship with Venice runs deep.

In 2022, the British-Indian sculptor acquired the historic Palazzo Manfrin in Cannaregio, one of the largest privately owned palazzi in Venice, with the intention of establishing a permanent foundation and exhibition space dedicated to his work. It will be accessible to the public in May during Biennale after four years of restoration.

8. The Venice Venice Hotel

Golden Goose

Alessandro Gallo and Francesca Rinaldo, the Venetian couple who founded Golden Goose, turned their creative energy toward the city. The Venice Venice Hotel is one of several bold moves that show just how far their creative vision extends beyond fashion. The hotel occupies Palazzo Ca’ da Mosto, widely considered the oldest on the Grand Canal, a Byzantine structure dating to the 13th century that had spent decades in abandonment before their restoration.

Their guiding concept is POSTVENEZIANITÀ – a cultural movement they coined to describe a Venice capable of genuine dialogue with contemporary life without sacrificing its roots. Each room has been conceived as a distinct piece, with collaborations spanning Arte Povera, conceptual art, radical architecture, and Fluxus.

9. AMA Venezia

Venice has a long tradition of collectors who arrive and never quite leave.

Laurent Asscher is a Belgian collector and philanthropist and one of the most compelling to have chosen La Serenissima as his home for art. AMA Venezia, named after the initials of his three children, opened in April 2025 in a meticulously retrofitted former soap factory on Fondamenta de Ca’ Vendramin. The collection has a particular focus on American artists from the 1960s to the present.

10. Fondazione Dries Van Noten

One of 2026’s most anticipated cultural openings.

Dries Van Noten, who stepped back from his label in 2024 after nearly four decades, and his partner, the chef Patrick Vangheluwe, acquired the magnificent Palazzo Pisani Moretta. Built in the late 15th century in Venetian Gothic Fiorito style and redecorated between 1735 and 1750 by Chiara Pisani in an immaculate Rococo idiom with frescoes by Tiepolo, Guarana, Diziani, and Angeli, the palazzo has hosted an annual Carnival masquerade for centuries and appeared in films from Casino Royale to The Tourist.

The Fondazione is dedicated entirely to craftsmanship. As Van Noten has put it: “Craftsmanship is things that you do with your hands, yes, but also with your soul.”

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Subject matter

Beautiful woman > elderly woman > anonymous man
Nude > clothed
Female nude > male nude
Calm water > turbulent water > shipwrecks
Figure > landscape > still life
Abstraction as stand-alone case
Purebred > mixed breeds

The single biggest driver of long-term appreciation, beyond the artist’s reputation, is what the painting depicts.

Portraits of beautiful women and children consistently outperform portraits of elderly subjects or anonymous men.

Nude figures tend to sell better than clothed ones. And female nudes, historically and still today, outperform male nudes by a significant margin.

Water is a fascinating case. Calm water adds value, think of how Monet’s Water Lilies series has performed. Turbulent water tends to reduce value. Shipwrecks reduce it further.

Figurative works outperform landscapes, and landscapes outperform still lifes. Within still lifes, however, flowers outperform fruit, and there is an entire sub-hierarchy of floral desirability.

Abstraction is a peculiar case: when produced by certain artists, it can reach extraordinary price levels. Yet figurative imagery attracts a broader collector base, including less specialised buyers. Abstract works, by contrast, often require a more educated and historically aware audience, which can reduce the pool of potential buyers at any given time.

Animal subjects follow a fairly strict hierarchy. Purebred dogs sell better than mixed breeds. Horses associated with nobility or sport outperform working horses. Among birds, hunting scenes command the highest prices.

Color

Red > white > blue > yellow > green > black
Bright, saturated > muted, opaque
Primary palette > tertiary palette

Color follows a surprisingly consistent market logic.

Bright, saturated hues outperform muddy or muted ones. When two works by the same artist are otherwise equal, the warmer and brighter one will typically command a premium. Works dominated by violet, brown, or grey tend to struggle unless they are the artist’s unmistakable signature, as in the case of the deep blue developed by Yves Klein.

Brett Gorvy, International Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie's, articulated a descending order of market-friendly colors: red, white, blue, yellow, green, black. There is one famous exception worth noting: for Warhol, green performs exceptionally well because green is the color of money, as economist Donald Thompson expressed in his book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art.

Format and Orientation

Horizontal > vertical
Square = strong in contemporary
Mid-size > very large (in terms of liquidity)

Horizontal canvases sell better than vertical ones. They integrate more easily into domestic and corporate interiors, and they read more naturally in large-scale contemporary living spaces.

Square formats have gained considerable prestige in the contemporary market, particularly for works by living artists.

Size matters, but in a nuanced way. Larger works command higher prices in absolute terms, but they are less liquid: the pool of buyers shrinks with the dimensions. Mid-size works are consistently the most tradeable over time.

Obscenity and Transgression

Decency > Obscenity (for most artists)
Transgression = brand (for a handful of superstars)

The market generally does not reward shock for its own sake.

Controversial content complicates institutional loans, insurance, and resale. But for certain artists whose entire market identity is built around provocation, obscenity amplifies rather than diminishes demand. This is a privilege of dominant market position, not a general strategy.

Provenance and Period

Exhibited, catalogued > never shown publicly, undocumented
Signed on front > signed on back
Mature period > early or experimental work
Recognizable work > one-off

Beyond what a work depicts and how it looks, its history matters enormously.

Institutional exhibition history, catalogue documentation, and distinguished prior ownership all add measurable value.

Works signed on the front generally trade more easily, all else being equal.

Within an artist’s career, the mature phase, when the signature style is most fully formed, usually commands the highest prices.

A work that looks immediately and unmistakably like that artist will almost always outperform experimental detours, even when the latter may be artistically more interesting as the market rewards legibility.

A Final Note

Everything above describes tendencies, not certainties. Works that go against every observation listed here can achieve extraordinary results if the artist, the moment, and the collector chemistry align. What these patterns offer is a baseline: an understanding of what the market tends to reward when all else is equal.

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Here’s my personal insider route through the city, where art blends into how cafés are designed, which books are stocked, and how museums frame views.

1. Louisiana Museum

This is non-negotiable.

Located just outside the city, Louisiana is one of the most refined museum experiences both architecturally and curatorially. The building opens directly onto the sea, and exhibitions flow through glass corridors and sculpture gardens.

It’s the kind of place where art, landscape and design culture feel completely inseparable. My favourite room has floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the water, where sculptures almost come alive.

2. Beau Marché Café à Vins

Beau Marché is technically a café, wine bar and interior design shop all in one, but it feels more like stepping into someone’s very good taste. The owners have French roots, and it shows in the round café tables spilling onto the street, the wicker chairs, the floor-to-ceiling wine bottles, and that effortlessly casual elegance the French do so well.

The food choice is small but delicious, but what you’re really here for is the atmosphere, the hidden courtyard, the rustic tables, and the sense that you’ve found something slightly off the beaten path even though you’re in the middle of town.

3. Ruby Atelier

Ruby Atelier hosts carefully curated vintage furniture alongside contemporary art. The space challenges the traditional gallery experience by treating furniture and art as part of the same visual conversation, as in the case of Pierre Jeanneret’s chairs placed next to abstract paintings.

4. Copenhagen Contemporary

CC is where the city shows its most ambitious, large-scale contemporary art in an old shipyard area.

The permanent highlight is James Turrell’s Aftershock, a Ganzfeld installation created specifically for CC, a sensory space filled with intense coloured light that creates complete disorientation where boundaries dissolve. After years as a beloved temporary installation, CC purchased it permanently in 2024.

5. Louise Roe & The Roe bar

Louise Roe is both a designer and a testament to Danish aesthetic sensibility, through clean lines, natural materials and pieces that feel contemporary without trying too hard.

The Roe Bar, connected to the showroom space, continues this philosophy: it’s about creating an environment where good design is simply the baseline. Food and coffee are top-notch.

6. Storm & Naked concept stores

Two concept stores close to one another, encapsulating an ever-evolving selection of clothing, accessories, books and objects, such as my favourite cups and flower vases by Niko June.

The spaces themselves are minimal, almost gallery-like, letting the pieces take the spotlight.

7. HAY house

The HAY House flagship takes up multiple floors and functions as a showroom. You’ll find furniture, textiles, lighting and kitchen objects, all embodying that particular Danish ability to make functionality beautiful without making it precious. My favourite objects are the funky candles with their holders.

8. Apotek 57

Within Frama’s design there is a beautifully curated café and bakery shop.

It’s one of the most popular spots in terms of both food quality and crowd. Expect a queue at peak hours, as it’s walk-in only.

9. Soho House Copenhagen

Soho House Copenhagen is always a safe choice in terms of setting and atmosphere.

One particular evening I recall was when a local artist was painting live during aperitivo and into the night, with the space functioning simultaneously as a social venue, bar and impromptu studio. There is always something fun going on.

10. New Mags

New Mags has a highly curated selection of books on art, design, fashion, watches, architecture, and visual culture, presented in a space that treats books as the design objects they are. The space itself is minimal and considered, letting the books do the talking. It’s the kind of place where you go in for one book and leave with three, not because of aggressive merchandising but because the curation is that good.

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That story reveals another layer of art, showing how it operates not merely as an asset class, but as a powerful social instrument. The tradition stretches back to Ancient Rome and Greece, where wealthy patrons understood that commissioning sculptures, temples, and public monuments was not just about artistic splendor but rather inscribing themselves into the cultural fabric of their time and creating an enduring legacy by belonging to civilization itself. A fortune could be invested, spent, or stolen, but a work commissioned in someone’s name outlived them. The origins of art patronage may be a story for another article, but the mechanism remains relevant, with art functioning as a currency of legitimacy and as the force that turns wealth into lasting status.

Economists would describe artworks as positional goods: objects whose value is inseparable from the position they grant within a social hierarchy. For someone who is already comfortably wealthy, there are very few things that can generate as much symbolic power as a recognizable artwork. Luxury, by contrast, has become increasingly noisy. A fast car? Anyone with a decent year in crypto or a successful exit can write that cheque. A small yacht is attainable for many. Art, however, still creates distinction because it operates through a shared cultural code. A large, recognizable slashed canvas on a living-room wall immediately triggers recognition, signaling taste, education, and cultural sophistication categorizing its owner among rich people who rich right.

What is often misunderstood is that not all art generates status. Most artworks never will. Thompson, in his book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, uses the example of Jasper Johns’s White Flag (1958), owned by Michael Ovitz.

Possessing a work like that, he writes, “elevates you above the crowd of collectors and makes you unreachable.” There is a hierarchy even within the art world. At the highest ranks of collecting, money by itself has very little meaning, simply because everyone already has it. But owning a rare, historically significant piece puts you in an entirely different category. Thompson refers to branded artworks, noting that, just as fashion houses create aspirational status symbols through logos and recognition, certain artists become brands unto themselves. A Hirst, a Koons, a Basquiat are names that carry instant recognition, even among people who know nothing about art. They are the Hermès Birkin bags of the walls, and they perform the same function: immediate, legible status. But truly savvy collectors understand that the brand is not enough. It is about owning the right piece by the right artist. Colour, size, date, and provenance all matter.

Those who counterfeited were trying to do what a high net worth collector does: convert financial capital into cultural capital, to transform money (which is common among their peers) into respectable prestige (which is rare). This is precisely how perceived value is created.

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1. Casa Museo Boschi di Stefano

A very Milanese way to begin.

Hidden in a residential building, this apartment museum was the private collection of Antonio Boschi and Marieda di Stefano, two of the most important private patrons of twentieth-century Italian art. The space itself is unchanged from how they lived: de Chirico, Fontana, Morandi, and Sironi hang in rooms that still feel like a home. What makes it special is the intimacy. You’re not looking at art in a white cube, you’re experiencing major artists in corridors and living rooms.

Entry is free, which somehow adds to its charm. It feels like Milan’s best-kept secret.

2. Chiesa Rossa — Dan Flavin

One of Milan’s most understated contemporary installations.

The church sits in a less central part of the city, but it hosts one of Dan Flavin’s most important permanent European works. The American minimalist master installed colored fluorescent lights throughout this 1930s church, transforming the interior into a glowing, ethereal space where art, architecture, and spirituality merge. The light shifts depending on where you stand, what time of day you visit, how the natural light interacts with Flavin’s neons.

“It is what it is and it ain’t nothing else” — Flavin once said of his work. Flavin’s light structures neither affirm nor deny the divine; they simply exist, proving nothing beyond their own presence and allowing neither to prevail.

My tip is to visit after sunset when the colors can really pop out and the space becomes almost otherworldly.

3. Villa Panza — Varese

Villa Panza is about an hour’s drive from Milan, but it’s absolutely worth the trip.

The villa was owned by Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo and his wife Giovanna, one of the most influential patrons of American minimal and conceptual art in Europe. The collection includes site-specific installations by James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and Dan Flavin among others, works that were created for these exact rooms, responding to the architecture, light, and atmosphere of the villa itself.

At the time, Italian museums did not yet have the sensitivity to receive contemporary works of this kind, so he donated the villa with its collection to FAI for public fruition.

The collection is recognized worldwide as a prime destination for contemporary art enthusiasts.

4. Santuario di San Bernardino alle Ossa

Not for the faint of heart, but its unexpected uniqueness makes it unforgettable.

The ossuary is a small Baroque space entirely decorated with human bones arranged in ornamental patterns. It’s macabre, yes, but there’s something mesmerizing about it: a reminder of mortality that’s both confronting and strangely peaceful. The space dates back centuries and represents a tradition of memento mori.

I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

5. Villa Necchi Campiglio & Galleria Massimo De Carlo

A beautiful intersection of architecture, design, art and a pool that feels impossibly chic even by today’s standards.

Villa Necchi is a masterpiece of Italian rationalism by architect Piero Portaluppi. The house preserves an extraordinary collection spanning from works contemporary to its construction, like pieces by Fausto Pirandello (Luigi’s son), to major names including Modigliani, Matisse, Picasso, and Fontana hung throughout the upper floors.

Another Portaluppi masterpiece hosts Massimo De Carlo, one of Italy’s most internationally recognized contemporary galleries. The historic rationalist elegance meets cutting-edge contemporary art, both essential to understanding Milan’s cultural identity.

6. Gucci Boutique

Not just a fashion stop.

The historic Gucci boutique on Via Montenapoleone, first opened in 1951, was recently reimagined under former creative director Sabato De Sarno with interiors that balance Seventies references and industrial undertones. But what elevated the space was the art collection curated by independent curator Truls Blaasmo. Works by masters like Lucio Fontana and Getulio Alviani appear alongside contemporary pieces by Franco Mazzucchelli, Getulio Alviani and Augustas Serapinas integrated throughout the boutique rather than hung as decoration.

It’s a sharp example of how art can inhabit commercial environments without compromising conceptual depth. The best retail spaces understand that art and design pieces are part of the experience, part of what makes a space worth remembering.

7. Casa Cipriani

Casa Cipriani quietly operates as a curated environment rather than a simple hospitality space. It channels the cultural legacy of the original Harry’s Bar in Venice, where figures like Peggy Guggenheim, Andy Warhol, and Ernest Hemingway once gathered.

The Milan outpost has carried forward this tradition through initiatives such as Arte a Casa, which brought together Italian galleries to integrate works by artists like Agostino Bonalumi, Lucio Fontana, CB Hoyo and Monica Bonvicini throughout the club’s interiors.

Here you’re surrounded by pieces that speak to a certain vision of Italian cultural life, one where great food, great design, and great art aren’t separate categories but part of the same pursuit of beauty and quality.

8. Gallerie d’Italia — Caveau

One of Milan’s most overlooked exhibition spaces.

Gallerie d’Italia is worth visiting for the collection alone, but what makes the experience special is the contrast: the monumental, austere architecture framing both classical masterpieces together with modern and contemporary works. It’s intellectually very satisfying, but the Caveau is the real insider moment.

It opens once a month by appointment and it was the bank’s original vault, defined by heavy doors, reinforced walls and mid-century engineering. Where the safety deposit boxes once stood, around 500 Italian works from the second half of the 20th century are now held, with a selection shown on a rotating basis.

9. Casa Gregotti

Casa Gregotti is a recently opened private home gallery that blends the intimacy of a historic residence with the vitality of a contemporary cultural space.

Housed in the former apartment of art collector Quinto Gregotti, redesigned in the 1960s with the help of his nephew, architect Vittorio Gregotti, the space has been carefully restored to host exhibitions, site-specific projects, talks and events that create a continuous dialogue.

Accessible by appointment, the space positions itself as a fresh and new cultural salon in the city.

10. Fondazione Prada

A necessary final stop.

Founded by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli, Fondazione Prada has become one of Europe’s most influential contemporary art institutions. It’s where Milan shows its most international, ambitious, and intellectually curious side.

The complex, designed by OMA under Rem Koolhaas, is a study in contrasts. Historic industrial buildings sit alongside new structures wrapped in gold leaf and the iconic Bar Luce designed by American film director Wes Anderson.

The exhibitions have included everything from major retrospectives to new installations that push boundaries. But even beyond what’s on view, the architecture itself rewards exploration.

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Here are my favourite spots to check out when you’re in town.

1. James Turrell Skyspace Piz Uter

This is a must-see.

Head up to Piz Uter around sunset and check the exact time on your weather app, the installation comes alive as light fades. Turrell’s work is about experience: light, sky, and perception become the piece itself.

“I like to use light as a material, but my medium is actually perception. I want you to sense yourself sensing, to see yourself seeing.” - James Turrell

For me it’s one of the most unique art spots in St. Moritz: embracing, meditative, and just unforgettable.

2. Hauser & Wirth

Right in town, Hauser & Wirth’s space always feels worth a stop, and during these weekends they usually have something compelling on.

The current Giacometti show especially resonates with the Swiss alpine setting.

3. Chesa Marchetta

Chesa Marchetta is a beautifully restored historic house with deep cultural roots. Before being brought back to life by Artfarm, run by Iwan Wirth and Manuela Wirth, co-founders of Hauser & Wirth, it was a beloved restaurant and guesthouse owned by the Godly family, frequented by artists and thinkers over the decades.

Today it’s a warm, intimate boutique hotel and restaurant with astonishing art pieces all around. The collection mixes historic and contemporary works, think of Giacometti, Philip Guston, Louise Bourgeois, Nicolas Party, you’re literally dining surrounded by great art.

Go for dinner, sit back, and let the interiors and the stories around them do a lot of the talking.

Sils Maria is often described as the cultural heart of the Engadin. Figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcel Proust, Alberto Giacometti, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Marc Chagall, and William Faulkner all spent time here.

4. Pietro Terzini Installation — The Grace La Margna Hotel

The Grace La Margna has teamed up with Italian artist Pietro Terzini to turn its façade into an ever-changing artwork.

This winter’s installation is headlined by humorous phrases that light up the building, injecting a playful, contemporary pulse into the classic alpine streetscape.

5. Carsten Höller Pink Mirror Carousel

A playful, unexpected stop.

Installed at the Kulm Hotel, this bright pink carousel by Carsten Höller is exactly what it looks like: an art piece you can sit on. It plays with perception and childhood nostalgia, it’s a fun bookend to your day.

6. Tony Kelly World

A bold, contemporary counterpoint to the more contemplative stops.

Tony Kelly’s work brings a sharp, playful energy through glossy compositions, bold colour, and a sense of irony that just works. His photographs are immediately engaging without being obvious, adding pop energy and visual confidence into the rhythm of the weekend.

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So, do you have to be beautiful to succeed in the art world?

Yes — but what is meant by beautiful?

At first glance, the industry seems to reward a certain visual polish: the well-groomed gallerist, the effortlessly composed advisor, the collector who looks as intentional as their collection. Luxury, after all, is an economy of perception.

In sales and advisory roles, attractive or impeccably presented people do perform better on average. This is known as the Halo Effect: when we perceive someone as visually appealing, we subconsciously assume they are also more competent, more intelligent, and more trustworthy.

Multiple studies show that people judged as attractive receive higher evaluations in professional contexts, even when their actual performance is identical to others. We listen more closely. We hesitate less. We say yes more easily. This is sometimes called “pretty privilege.” Some brands have famously built entire retail strategies around it, with staff functioning as living extensions of brand desirability. But the art industry is not retail, and beauty here works differently.

In the art world, it is not about beauty in a conventional sense. It is about elegance, class, and presence: how someone occupies space, how contained their gestures are, how considered their appearance feels rather than how striking it is. And yes, this is also conveyed through how you look. Not because looks are the point, but because appearance is one of the fastest carriers of information in a perceptual economy.

When someone exudes elegance, we intuitively assume that they know when to speak, when to step back, when not to interfere. That they will not impose themselves on the artwork, the collector, or the sale. Elegance suggests that attention will be placed correctly. It is not necessarily about charisma or performance. It’s often the opposite. It is the absence of excess effort. In art sales especially, over-explaining a work, over-justifying its value, or pushing too hard for agreement can quietly erode trust. Collectors tend to read contained behavior as confidence in the object itself. Studies on interpersonal trust show that people subconsciously associate calm, grounded behavior with competence and reliability, even when no objective evidence is present.

Then there is style as coherence. When the way you dress, speak, and move aligns, people do not have to work to read you. Inconsistency, on the other hand, creates friction and leads to mistrust. When someone’s visual language clashes with their verbal or intellectual one, the brain registers cognitive dissonance. In environments where decisions are symbolic and high-stakes, that dissonance is expensive.

Refinement is what signals reliability because it implies discernment. Someone who is considered in how they present themselves is assumed to be considered in their choices as well.

Adding on this, there is care. How someone treats their own appearance, time, and attention is read as a preview of how they will treat artworks, collections, and relationships. Someone who arrives consistently prepared, rested, and attentive signals that they respect the weight of what they are handling. Someone who neglects themselves often leaks that neglect into how they handle everything else.

In an industry where objects are handled on behalf of others, where narratives are shaped carefully over time, and where relationships compound over decades, care becomes credibility: this person understands stewardship. And stewardship, ultimately, sits at the core of cultural power.

This is why beauty matters professionally in the art world.

Because people are not just asking whether you are knowledgeable. They are asking something else entirely: Would I trust this person to choose for me?

Success, therefore, is correlated to a broader concept of beauty in a world that trades in perception. Luxury has always understood this. When the person presenting value appears intentional, composed, and aesthetically coherent, we assume the value itself is legitimate.

In the art world, where value is rarely self-evident, this mechanism is amplified.

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Some of the most iconic art collections have been built by places that understood one simple truth: art can function as currency inside the right social ecosystem.

During the Second World War, a small hotel in the south of France, La Colombe d’Or, became a refuge for artists including Braque, Picasso, Chagall and Renoir. Many of them effectively took up residence there. The owners, Paul Roux and his wife, were not art experts. They were simply generous hosts who became friends with the artists and began accepting paintings, in exchange for meals and rooms.

A handwritten sign was hung on the door:

“Ici on loge à cheval, à pied ou en peinture.”

Here may stay those on horseback, on foot, or with a painting.

What began as a practical solution slowly became the defining soul of the hotel and the source of a collection worth millions. Suddenly, art had quietly become the most elegant form of payment.

Seventy years later, the same logic would reappear not in a bohemian auberge, but inside a global luxury members’ club.

Since 2009, Soho House has built an art collection of more than 10,000 works, including record breaking artists such as Damien Hirst, Rashid Johnson and Tracey Emin. But almost none of these works were bought in the traditional sense. Instead, they were acquired through a barter program: if an artwork was worth £6,000, Soho House would offer a £3,450 global membership and credit the rest.

For many artists, Soho House has been a key point in their early careers. It gave them visibility, introductions and proximity. Careers were shaped not only by exposure, but by where and with whom that exposure happened. Yet the uncomfortable truth is: Soho House didn’t simply act as a patron, it financialized its own cultural credibility.

Just as at La Colombe d’Or, art at Soho House served as a means of building community. But there is a crucial difference. At Colombe d’Or, art paid for survival. At Soho House, art paid for access.

Many other iconic hotels adopted this informal currency exchange over the years, rooms were quietly comping rooms for artists, directors, photographers, and writers because their presence itself carried value.

Art is the one asset that carries both cultural legitimacy and financial optionality. It makes a space feel soulful and gives it something it can liquidate when the story runs thin.

What distinguishes them is the accumulation of stories, habits, and repeated gestures that give a place weight beyond its physical appearance. Art plays different roles in each context: anchoring, receding, or rotating depending on what the space is meant to hold.

In this article I touch upon 3 venues I spent time in during my recent stay in LA:

• What Chateau Marmont understands about silence

• Craig’s on the mastery of familiarity

• Galerie On Sunset and the construction of atmosphere over time

What Chateau Marmont understands about silence

Chateau Marmont does not explain itself. It never has. Its power lies precisely in what it withholds.

The interiors are not overly articulate. Art is present, but never declarative. There are no moments that insist on interpretation, no works that demand attention. Instead, the space relies on silence as a form of authority.

This absence of explanation is deliberate. The hotel does not need to assert relevance through overly performative design choices, and because the space does not rush to define itself, people project meaning onto it. Over time, this quietly assumed confidence becomes self-reinforcing. Here, art behaves as background structure rather than a focal point. It stabilizes the atmosphere, quietly supporting a narrative built through repetition, privacy, and memory. The room holds because it leaves room, and the result is a place that feels inhabited rather than staged.

Craig’s on the mastery of familiarity

Craig’s operates on a different logic, and socially, it does so extremely well. What keeps people returning is not aesthetic coherence in the traditional sense, but familiarity. Craig’s works because it understands social choreography. It knows how to sustain habit and create belonging.

The art, however, does not carry the same intelligence. Its presence feels random, almost incidental, and at times disconnected from the atmosphere the space is otherwise so good at producing. Unlike Chateau Marmont, where art quietly supports the narrative, here it neither anchors the room nor adds meaning to it. Social consistency sustains the room’s success despite the lack of visual cohesion. Over time, that familiarity becomes its aesthetic, yet I believe a more deliberate, understated curatorial choice could quietly elevate the space further.

Galerie On Sunset and the construction of atmosphere over time

I went to Galerie On Sunset for a party, just across the street from Chateau Marmont and close to the Are We On Air? kiosk-othèque, a location that immediately places it within a very specific cultural radius.

The room pays homage to Old Hollywood, drawing on the Glam Rock era of the 1970s, with Carlo Scarpa–inspired sofas alongside cantilevered rattan chairs, while artworks and a deep-walnut DJ booth anchor the space.

Galerie On Sunset is conceived as a late-night hangout and dining spot which also hosts regular DJs, jazz nights, and rotating art exhibitions curated by Tyler Santangelo of ALLGORITHIM, expanding how and where art is experienced. The works displayed were by Los Angeles–based artist Samual Elliot Phillips, whose collaged compositions draw on archival imagery, print culture, and fragments of text. His pieces introduce a visual counterbalance, which works because they bring a sense of lightness and graphic clarity to the room’s heavier materials.

What Galerie On Sunset seems to understand is that new spaces cannot fabricate a social narrative, they can only prepare the ground for one. In fact, the space doesn’t impose its identity rigidly. Here, art, music, furniture, and light are aligned toward the same mood. Over time, repetition may do the rest.

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Members clubs, hotels, restaurants, and concept stores that manage to create this kind of environment often share a quiet intelligence. They understand how atmosphere is built over time, and how art can support that process not by competing for attention within other elements, but by anchoring a space and reinforcing brand’s cultural identity.

In this first article I will touch upon:

• why many contemporary spaces exhaust us

• the role art and time play in environments that hold

• how these rooms influence behavior, often to a brand’s advantage

Why many contemporary spaces exhaust us

The majority of contemporary spaces fail not because they lack taste, but because they try too hard to articulate it. The room asks something from you — to look, to react, to understand — and in doing so, creates a low but constant tension. You are never fully at ease, because the space is asking for a response and curation feels insistent. When everything tries to speak at once, attention fragments, and the room becomes restless. This is often where excessive statement art fails in lived spaces. The issue is rarely the quality of the art itself. Art has an extraordinary capacity to shape atmosphere, it can amplify intimacy, authority, reflection, even discomfort but only when it is placed with an understanding of the room’s emotional economy. It is a matter of choosing where attention should be directed: toward people, conversations, objects, music, or simply the passing of time.

Consider the example of a restaurant, in spaces with poor emotional economy, every wall carries bold statement art, lighting is aggressive throughout, and multiple focal points compete at once. Music and visuals fight for attention, leaving guests subtly overstimulated. Conversations fragment, eyes wander around the room instead of meeting across the table, and the space exhausts rather than holds.

On the other hand in places with strong emotional economy, the experience is shaped more deliberately. Attention is anchored in one place, large areas are left visually calm, and art is positioned where it supports the room instead of competing within it. Lighting guides focus rather than dispersing it. In these spaces, attention settles naturally, people look at each other, conversations deepen and time stretches without effort.

The role of art and time in rooms that hold

What has always struck me is how rare these spaces are to encounter. They are not necessarily expensive or inaccessible (even though many times they happen to be), what distinguish them is their unwillingness to hurry perception. Much like in life, places that do not feel the need to perform often feel the most authentic drawing people in without insistence. These tend to be those “if you know, you know” environments, whose reputation is built through repetition, memory, and word of mouth. By contrast, spaces that rush to attract attention rely on loud external cues that may generate short-term interest but rarely align with a brand’s identity in the long run. Instead of coherence, they compete for visibility.

Art in rooms that hold behaves differently. It settles into the space with the quiet authority of structure. Like architecture, it gives the room weight and continuity therefore its role is not to impress, but to anchor. Time is the invisible material that reveals this. On a first visit, it may feel simply interesting. On the tenth, it makes perfect sense. The true coherence unfolds slowly and inevitably over time.

How these rooms influence behavior, often to a brand’s advantage

The consequence of this on human behavior is interesting to notice. In a culture increasingly shaped by visibility and speed, rooms that hold teach us how to simply be. Gestures soften. Conversations linger. Silences feel natural rather than awkward. Voices lower. Behavior adjusts almost unconsciously. They model a slower, more grounded way of occupying space that benefits not only the people inside them, but also the brands and institutions behind them. Ease builds trust. Trust builds loyalty. Loyalty, over time, becomes cultural value.

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