The Best Art Deco Hotels in the World Right Now

A century after the 1925 Paris exposition that gave the style its name, Art Deco has stopped being a period and become a mood. Every new hotel with a fluted column and a brass sconce now claims it. Most of them are lying.

The real thing is rarer than the marketing suggests. It is a small group of buildings — mostly finished between 1929 and 1932, in the four-year window when the world was rich, then suddenly wasn't — that were designed as machines for glamour and have somehow survived long enough to still work. You can sleep in maybe a dozen of them.

These are the seven worth booking a trip around, ranked, with the rooms and the bars that actually justify the flight.

What makes a hotel actually Art Deco?

Geometry, materials, and confidence. Real Deco interiors run on hard, expensive surfaces — black marble, macassar ebony, silvered glass, chrome, lacquer — arranged in repeating geometric rhythm rather than the curling organic lines of the Art Nouveau era that preceded it. Look for stepped forms, sunbursts, zigzags, fluted columns, and etched glass.

The tell is the original detail. A hotel that commissioned Lalique glass in 1929 still has it. A hotel doing a Deco-inspired refresh in 2024 has a lot of brass. Both can be beautiful. Only one is the real article, and the difference is obvious the moment you walk into the room.

The seven Art Deco hotels worth the trip

1. Claridge's, London

The best of them, and it isn't especially close. Claridge's has been open since 1856, but its soul was installed in the 1920s and '30s: the decorator Basil Ionides reworked the restaurant and left engraved glass screens that are still on the walls, and in 1929 the architect Oswald Milne added the new block and the mirrored entrance that still sets the tone the second you come off Brook Street.

The move is The Fumoir — a jewel-box bar you enter through an original Lalique glass door panel, all deep purple velvet, dark lacquer, etched mirror, and a single Deco portrait watching the room. It seats almost nobody. Go early, sit at the bar, and understand that this is what everyone else is imitating. Claridge's is a Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star hotel, and the service is the reason — but you come for the rooms.

2. Fairmont Peace Hotel, Shanghai

The most authentic Deco hotel on earth, and the one most people have never considered. It opened in 1929 as the Cathay Hotel inside Sassoon House, Sir Victor Sassoon's monument to himself on the Bund, and it was the most glamorous address in Asia before the war took the whole world apart. Noël Coward wrote Private Lives here. Charlie Chaplin caused a scandal here.

The octagonal lobby sits under a glazed dome. There is original Lalique on the walls. The green pyramid roof is still the most recognisable silhouette on the Shanghai skyline. Go to the Jazz Bar, where the Old Jazz Band — Guinness World Record holders, average age north of what you'd guess — plays nightly, and ask for the Sassoon Suite if you want to sleep where he ran his empire. It's a Forbes Travel Guide Four-Star property.

3. Prince de Galles, Paris

Paris' Deco hotel, on Avenue George V, and the prettiest room-for-room of the group. It opened at the very end of the 1920s and celebrated its 90th birthday in 2019, which tells you everything about the vintage. Pierre-Yves Rochon's restoration in 2013 spent two and a half years putting the original detail back rather than papering over it.

Ask for a Mosaic suite — the bathrooms are tiled in ceramic mosaic sourced from the South of France, and they are the reason to book here rather than anywhere else on the avenue. There is a Tamara de Lempicka on the wall, which is the correct painter for the building. The heart of the place is Le Patio, the interior courtyard where the original 1929 mosaics survive; take breakfast there and skip the Champs-Élysées entirely. Forbes Travel Guide rates it Four-Star.

4. Excelsior Hotel Gallia, Milan

The 1932 building opposite Milano Centrale, now welded to a Marco Piva glass tower — an old-and-new collision that is very Milan and works better than it should. The Deco bones are in the staircase and the public rooms; the modern half is where the city actually goes.

Terrazza Gallia on the seventh floor is the rooftop, run under the Cerea family with the Lebano brothers in the kitchen, and it's the correct aperitivo in a city that takes aperitivo seriously. The Katara Suite on the roof runs to nearly 11,000 square feet with four bedrooms, a private spa, a screening room, and two terraces — one of the largest suites in Italy, and priced accordingly. A Forbes Travel Guide Four-Star hotel.

5. Sunset Tower Hotel, Los Angeles

Leland Bryant designed it in 1929 and it opened in 1931 as luxury apartments on the Sunset Strip, decorated with plaster friezes of zeppelins, animals, and Adam and Eve. Howard Hughes lived here. So did Bugsy Siegel. Jeff Klein bought it in 2005 and gave it back its name.

Here is the detail that matters, and it's the whole reason the hotel still means something: photography and filming are not allowed anywhere on the property without the general manager's approval, and at the Tower Bar, phone calls, laptops, and photos are all out. That rule is why the room is full of people who could go anywhere. Book a table at the Tower Bar, put the phone away, and look at who's actually there. It's a five-minute drive from the Chateau Marmont, and it is the more elegant address.

6. Hôtel Martinez, Cannes

Opened on 20 February 1929 on the Croisette and never really stopped being the centre of Cannes. The white facade with its ironwork balconies is the postcard, and the hotel holds France's Palace distinction, the state designation reserved for a short list of properties.

Pierre-Yves Rochon — the same hand as Prince de Galles — redid the 409 rooms and suites in a 1930s register: white lacquer, sky blue, pale yellow. The Penthouse apartments on the top floor open onto one of the largest private terraces in Europe, overlooking the bay. In May, this is the most fought-over real estate in the world; see our Cannes Film Festival guide for what that actually takes. In September, it's yours.

7. Delano Miami Beach

The new one, and the reason this list is worth reading in 2026. The Delano reopened this year after six years dark and a restoration reported at around $100 million, and Miami's most self-mythologising hotel is back on Collins Avenue with 171 rooms and suites.

Purists should know the tower went up in 1947, at the tail end of the era rather than its peak — but the columned entrance, the terrazzo floors, the white drapes, and the fin-topped silhouette are all preserved, and the lineage is unmistakable. The Rose Bar is back with its quartz-topped counter. The infinity-edged pool is back. Mimi Kakushi, the Dubai restaurant built around 1920s Osaka, has taken the fourth floor and is open only to hotel guests and the new members club — which is the single best reason to be a guest.

Which one should you actually book?

If you want the best hotel, it's Claridge's — and it is worth structuring a London trip around The Fumoir alone, which belongs on any list of the world's bars worth planning a trip around. If you want the most extraordinary room you'll ever sleep in, it's the Sassoon Suite at the Fairmont Peace Hotel, and Shanghai in October is the moment to do it.

If you're going for the design rather than the hotel, go to Paris and Milan back to back — Prince de Galles and Excelsior Gallia are three hours apart by air and represent the two poles of the style, French restraint and Italian bombast. It's the same instinct that makes Vienna work for the design obsessed: go where the buildings are the point.

And if you want the version with a pool and a scene, it's Miami. It always was.

What You Actually Want to Know

What is the most authentic Art Deco hotel in the world?

The Fairmont Peace Hotel in Shanghai. It opened in 1929 as the Cathay Hotel and retains original Lalique glass, its octagonal domed lobby, and its green pyramid roof. Claridge's has more polished Deco interiors, but the Peace Hotel is the least altered survivor of the era.

When is the best time to visit these hotels?

Shoulder season, and it isn't close. Cannes in September, after the yachts leave and before the Riviera closes. Shanghai in October, when the humidity breaks. Milan in late September during design and fashion weeks if you want the energy, or February if you want a table at Terrazza Gallia. London and Paris are year-round.

Is Art Deco the same as Art Nouveau?

No, and confusing them will cost you. Art Nouveau, roughly 1890 to 1910, is organic and curvilinear — vines, whiplash curves, flowers. Art Deco, which took its name from the 1925 Paris exposition, is geometric, machine-age, and hard-edged: zigzags, sunbursts, stepped forms, chrome and lacquer.

Which Art Deco hotel has the best bar?

The Fumoir at Claridge's, entered through an original Lalique door panel. The Tower Bar at Sunset Tower is the best room — no phones, no photos, no laptops — but the Fumoir is the better Deco object.

Can you still book the famous suites?

Yes, but not casually. The Sassoon Suite in Shanghai, the Katara Suite in Milan, and the Martinez Penthouse apartments in Cannes are all bookable and all release well in advance — the Cannes penthouses go a year out for May. This is exactly where an advisor earns their fee.

Noon's advisors have stayed in these properties and know which room number to ask for, not just which category. Tell us where you want to go.