World's best 'extreme design' hotels

FROM Greek Orthdox-style chapels, to villas along the Great Wall of China – it's time to drool over the world's most stylish hotels.

Spainish styling ... the Marmo Bar in Madrid's Hotel Puerta America features a single, 27-foot-long slab of marble, while the top floor has a pool, gym, sauna and the Sky Night bar. Pipcture: Rafael Vargas

STEP inside an "extreme design hotel" and you enter a designer's dream that, for a while at least, becomes your reality.

Clean white lines and copycat minimalism are no longer the makings of hip hotels; today, individualism is in.

 "I think it's something that breaks from the norm and is visually provocative, and it doesn't fit in with the generic, commodified hotels that have been done for the last 50 years," says pioneer hotel designer Ian Schrager.

With designer Philippe Starck, Schrager broke the mould with Morgans and the Royalton in the '80s. But with his latest venture, the Gramercy Park Hotel, he takes the minimalism that featured so prominently in those hotels and turns it on its head.

The 185-room hotel is a collaboration with New York art scene fixture Julian Schnabel, and is eclectic to the max. The lobby is a wholly original interplay of Renaissance colors and diverse textures, from red velvet curtains to reclaimed lumber and a glittering matador's jacket, and Damien Hirst artwork in the bar. Guestrooms, though resolutely plush, have a soupçon of imperial Spain.

Extreme makeovers

Service may be key these days, but on purely aesthetic levels many hotels continue to push the design envelope. And if design hotels have the kind of innovative touches that corporate chains love to co-opt, extreme design hotels are virtually untouchable in their audacity.

The Hotel Puerta America is a shining example. At this $94 million, 342-room property, the rage for all things design reaches its apotheosis. Each of its 12 guestroom floors was designed by a different high-profile architect or designer, and the difference between floors is nothing short of, well, extreme. "The idea was to have the work of the best architects in the same building," says hotel spokesperson Marta Cabello.

"They had no limit in the budget or in the use of colour or materials, so this was a dream for them."

Among those who worked their magic are rock stars of the design world Norman Foster, Jean Nouvel and Marc Newson (one of whose chairs, a Lockheed Lounge, sold for $968,000 at Sotheby's last year). Together yet independently, they crafted a realm of originality that's difficult to fathom for the uninitiated but easy as pie to appreciate. Consider Newson's guestrooms, where the beds were conceived as islands wrapped around by cushiony leather and bathroom sinks and tubs carved out of Carrara Statuario Venato marble.

Five-star treatment

The Puerta America is gutsy from within and without: Its rainbow exterior is inscribed with lines from Paul Eluard's poem "Liberty" translated 19 times. But some extreme design hotels make their statements more discreetly.

One of the world's best is in Brussels, where the almost secret Fashion Rooms are tucked discreetly into the outwardly conservative, five-star Royal Windsor Hotel. Each of the dozen rooms was created entirely by a Belgian designer, and they differ wildly.

In New York City, the Hotel on Rivington is a dazzling 21-story tower of tinted glass that rises in sharp – but welcome – contrast above the tangle of 19th-century red brick tenements. Sleekly appointed guest rooms bask in those rarest of Manhattan commodities: light, space and air.

But an extreme design hotel need not be relegated to the hippest precincts of the urban jungle. Indeed, being out in the middle of a picturesque nowhere can bring out the animal in an architect's wildest hotel fantasies.

Ultimately, extreme design hotels may not only be the manifestation of an architect's imagination, but rather a sign of the times. "I think this is a sort of brands-on-steroids era," says Schrager.

"Luxury is available and accessible to lots of people, and I think the only way you can really distinguish yourself is by having something on a very individualized basis."

Around the world, different artists and design visionaries are bringing their own daringly individual styles to the luxury hotel experience. Checking in was never so dramatic.