Art for hotels and restaurants in the UK, from Mayfair to the pub

Count by the key. Broadwick Soho opened in 2023 with 57 keys and 350 works, and the Chancery Rosewood, opened in September 2025 in the former US Embassy on Grosvenor Square, holds about 700 for its 144 suites, reported as Europe's largest hotel collection; Wallpaper* puts it above 800.

Few hotels collect at that level, but the arithmetic helps you budget. Split the building into three layers: a centrepiece or two for the lobby and restaurant; a set for the guest rooms, one or two per room; and a series for corridors, lift lobbies and stairs. The centrepiece can come from a gallery or an artist you collect. The sets and series are where painting to order pays, because every canvas is sized to its wall and belongs to one scheme. Worked through like this, a 30-room townhouse hotel comes to roughly 60 to 100 pieces.

Much of British hospitality lives in old buildings, from Annabel's Georgian townhouse on Berkeley Square to Estelle Manor, a 108-room hotel made from a neo-Jacobean mansion on the edge of the Cotswolds. One estate agent's guide to listed buildings advises hanging pictures ‘without using nails or screws’, fixing into mortar joints rather than drilling the fabric, and notes that altering panelling or chimney breasts needs listed building consent. Agree fixings with your conservation officer early, and use picture rails or existing hanging points.

Period rooms also set the format. Victorian rooms mostly have ceilings of 2.7 to 3 m and Georgian principal rooms go higher; Georgian chimney breasts are slender and shallow, Victorian ones heavier. So the piece over the mantel is usually vertical or square and narrower than the breast, and a panelled wall takes a canvas inside each panel.

London's clubs show the register. Martin Brudnizki built Annabel's around ‘animals and gardens, flora and fauna’ and said of it: ‘You might not want this at home, but it's fun to have dinner here’. Members of George on Mount Street dine among works by David Hockney, and at 76 Dean Street a 2022 refresh gave Soho House a blue dining room and a pink one.

Diners look from a seat, so hang the centre of the canvas lower than in a corridor and choose colour and contrast that hold in dim evening light. Colour-drenched rooms are spreading, with searches for ‘colour drench’ on Houzz UK up 142% in early 2025, and a painting chosen against white can vanish on a saturated wall, so test it against the paint or have it painted to the banquette fabric. More in art for restaurant groups and bars.

The pub is the original picture-hung room: panelling, a long banquette and a wall of frames above it, a look borrowed from the country house. The first Annabel's hung Landseer, Munnings and Bateman in what the writer Harry Mount called a ‘cluttered, eclectic country house look’, and a 1998 MORI survey of British adults found that most people like wild animals in a painting.

In a pub that means horses, dogs, game birds and hares, landscapes and still lifes on dark green, oxblood or inky blue grounds, as a run of 60–90 cm canvases above the seating around one larger focal piece. Handle the clichés with care. Landseer's The Monarch of the Glen became ‘the ultimate biscuit-tin image of Scotland’ through mass reproduction, so a stag painted fresh in your palette reads better than one more copy. A pub group can give each house its own mix and keep the codes on file for refits; each pub is its own order, labelled wall by wall.

Mollie's in Manchester commissioned Manchester-based and northern artists, and Treehouse Manchester has illustrated headboards and an artist-in-residence series of street art. In Edinburgh, NYX hangs work by Scottish creatives, Glasgow-based artists among them, and 100 Princes Street has a botanical mural by Croxford and Saunders up its staircase and tartans by Araminta Campbell. The Fife Arms at Braemar sets Picasso and Lucian Freud among Victorian Scottish painting.

At any budget, buy the centrepiece from a local artist, then have the rooms and corridors painted to order around it: the view from the roof, the hills behind the hotel, an archive photograph of the building, your crest. Send us the image with the wall size and we suggest the size and finish; you need the rights to the image, and the design can stay exclusive to you if you ask before we start. See paintings from your own image and the guide to British taste and styles.

London's newest hotels avoid identical rooms. The Emory shared its suite floors between four designers, a ‘vertical biennale’ in Galerie's phrase, and The OWO commissioned unique works from five London-based women artists for its guest rooms. You can have that variety within one scheme: one composition painted in several palettes, one per floor, or one painter's hand across many subjects.

Size to the room type. New-build ceilings in the UK are often about 2.4 to 2.5 m: a horizontal canvas two-thirds the width of the bed and no taller than about 80 cm sits well over the headboard. Converted period rooms of 2.7 to 3 m take a vertical or square piece over the chimney breast. Corridors want a series of 60–90 cm works in one frame, hung at one centre height. Each canvas arrives labelled by room with a packing list, and its code stays on file for re-orders. See the UK size guide, hotel corridor artwork and art for every room type.

The UK had Europe's largest hotel construction pipeline in the first quarter of 2026, 268 projects and 39,024 rooms, and about 18,000 rooms were under construction by December 2025. Art chosen at the design stage gets its own budget line and the right fixings; art chosen after handover gets what is left.

Send the room schedule, drawings or photos of the walls with the palette. We reply with sizes and a shortlist from some 1,300 catalogue designs, or designs made for the building, usually within one business day. Order one canvas as a sample if you like; the rest follow in the same hand. Stretched or framed arrives ready to hang, and plaster relief like the sunflower pictured always travels that way. Larger orders may go by air or sea freight, with the shipping cost confirmed before dispatch.

Each canvas can travel stretched and ready to hang, framed, or rolled; a rolled canvas, the lightest and most economical way to send a large painting, arrives without stretcher bars, and any local framer can stretch it for you.