Get Your Flowers

Counting flowers on the wall, that won’t bother you at all when you stay at these hotels with some of our favorite botanical-based wallpaper. Your mom will probably love them.

I got my mom flowers for Mother’s Day. In recent years, I’d been sending her bouquets that were more, let’s say, challenging than maybe she would’ve preferred. Plants, more than flowers, actually. Things that wouldn’t expire in a week. Things she’d have to care for and put on display every time we visit lest the crushing guilt of withered leafy death weigh heavy on her soul.

But this year — this year I sent her proper flowers. Roses and the like. And a note that absolved her of any obligation to keep anything alive longer than it took her to text us a picture and a thank you. Next year — next year maybe I’ll skip the routine all together and send her instead to a fantastic hotel with flowers on the walls. Like the twelve below.

You might’ve noticed, but wallpaper has made a comeback in interior design. Not that long ago, wallpaper in hotels was a sign of antiquity and obsolescence and a signal that a colorless and clean refresh was probably necessary. Now it’s the mark of the modern age — a confident yawp that no less than the steadiest hand and clearest mind chose this particular pattern you can’t stop staring at.

The pattern we’re focusing on today: floral. Flowers, fleurs-de-lis, and fronds. Buds, bulbs, and blooms. Colorful or crispy, walls or ceilings. A symbol of life or a reminder of death. We’ll take all comers. These are some of our favorite flora-filled hotel spaces.
 

Les Étangs de Corot

Ville-d’Avray, France

An elegant escape in a pastoral setting midway between Paris and Versailles is not the toughest thing to sell. This was as true for Corot and his Impressionist contemporaries as it is for guests of Les Étangs de Corot today, and the hotel bears their influence to this day — three suites are named Impressionniste, Barbizon, and Atelier d’Artistes, though the colorful wallpapers of the Esquisse Rooms might be most memorable.

Arrive Palm Springs

Palm Springs, CA, USA

Arrive Palm Springs is a Palisociety venture, an adaptation of the group’s accessibly glamorous look and invitingly sociable atmosphere to a modernist-inspired compound in the Uptown Design District. The architecture is distinctive, and traces its heritage to the local style. Interiors feature some retro-inspired elements, from Victorian-style wallpaper and curvaceous leather armchairs to modernist chairs, desks, and lamps.

Kimpton Hotel Fontenot

New Orleans, LA, USA

The aesthetic and experience at the Hotel Fontenot are carefully tailored to New Orleans, displaying just the right measure of French influence alongside Kimpton’s usual understated modernist-inspired design. This is a famously hedonistic town, and a hotel won’t get far without a decent restaurant and bar. Thankfully the Peacock Room is up to the task, an eccentric, French-accented fantasy with a 19th-century bar.

Triana House

Seville, Spain

Named not only for its address but for its Seville neighborhood, Triana House is bursting with local pride for all of Andalusia — each of its seven rooms is named for a different site, from Córdoba to Alhambra and beyond. Ultimately, though, they share more similarities than differences — while the details vary, all are suitably ornate in their décor, and full of bold color and dense visual texture.

Boardwalk Boutique Hotel

Palm Beach, Aruba

Boardwalk Boutique Hotel Aruba is a vibrant, colorful, eclectic boutique hotel set amid a coconut grove just a five-minute stroll from Palm Beach. Most casitas come complete with kitchens and private patios with barbecues and hammocks. The bright and breezy décor is lit by plentiful sunlight, and while the style leans in to the inspiration of the tropical locale, it feels fresh and full of personality.

Hotel Eldorado

Paris, France

L’Eldorado’s owner has an eye for eclectic design; the hotel’s interiors span a multitude of eras, though it all adds up to a remarkably unified aesthetic. One thing it’s not is minimalist, or modernist — the rooms, with their ornately patterned wallpapers and textiles, have personality in spades. One suite comes with a private sauna, and many units face the garden from private terraces or balconies.

Foresters Hall

Cowes, UK

The Georgian townhouse that’s now home to Foresters Hall has long been a Cowes fixture, but its most recent chapter began in 2022 when a couple of film-industry professionals premiered it as their first hospitality venture. The rooms are all different, though they’re united by the decorative eye of their proprietors, who have outfitted Foresters Hall with period-correct Georgian decorative elements.

Naumi Wellington

Wellington, New Zealand

The Naumi hotel group is based in Singapore, but that doesn’t stop the colorful creations of hotelier Gaurang Jhunjhnuwala from fitting perfectly into the New Zealand hospitality scene. The richly detailed spaces at Naumi Wellington are as bold as they come, and the riot of floral prints at reception is immediate proof you’re in for something much more opinionated than standard-issue greige boutique-hotel minimalism.

Palihouse West Hollywood

Los Angeles, CA, USA

The design at Palihouse West Hollywood incorporates L.A.’s plentiful European influences and encompasses a multitude of eras on the way to delivering a blend that ultimately feels fresh and fully realized. The hotel’s Lobby Lounge Café & Bar is a versatile space suited for everything from solo work to late-night revelry, but it’s the floral ceiling at reception that might bring the biggest smile to your face.

Pug Seal Allan Poe

Mexico City, Mexico

Set behind wrought-iron gates on a residential block, Pug Seal Allan Poe is a small hotel that feels more like a large house — though one whose proximity to the urban oasis of Chapultepec Park led to whimsical, nature-inspired interiors. Butterflies and insects dot the patterned wallpaper, tree branch sculptures and stag head busts are mounted above beds, and the color palette calls to mind sand, stone, sea, and sky.

Rajmahal Palace

Jaipur, India

Owned by the royal family of Jaipur, Rajmahal Palace is grand in a traditional way, with high archways and glittering chandeliers. But the otherworldly interior design — rich with whimsical details, symmetrical shapes, and bold pops of color — looks as meticulously composed as a Wes Anderson film. It comes by its historical character honestly, of course — that’s the royal family’s own classic Ford Thunderbird out front.

Providence

Paris, France

Providence shares a lineage with Brasserie Barbès, the in-demand nightspot in Paris, as well as about a dozen more of the city’s best bars and restaurants. Architect Philippe Medioni breathed new life into this once-derelict space, decorating the Providence in a style that’s pure urban Parisian romance, retro-influenced but devoid of kitsch — including palm wallpaper by House of Hackney, if you’re a connoisseur.