The Hotel Des Arts by Gregory McNamee

For a historically bohemian town, San Francisco has gone awfully upscale in the last decade or so. Happily, the Hotel des Arts, a onetime Victorian boardinghouse on the edge of the Financial District, honors the artful past by showcasing the work of some of the city’s leading artists; some 36 of the hotel’s rooms contain paintings, photographs, and sculptures, all of which have turned out to be quite a draw. Make reservations early, in other words--the newly renovated hotel is often booked solid, thanks largely to the hotel’s new connoisseur clientele, and the lobby is swarming with black-clad, earnest-looking young people.

The rooms
The Hotel des Arts has two main draws. The first, of course, is the art, located in rooms scattered throughout the hotel. Room 405, for instance, offers an allusive, primitivist dreamscape by Casey O’Connell; room 307 contains an installation by Anthony Sirkin, at whose heart is a large photograph; room 203 highlights a bright, cheerful mural (complete with some glow-in-the-dark surprises) by Maria Gillespie; and room 508 contains graffito-like imagery by Eric Orr, whose work calls to mind that of Jean-Michel Basquiat if he had been painting a cave on Mars. The second draw is the tariff: even the grandest of the rooms does not exceed $150 a night, and many are under $100 (though usually with a shared bathroom).