Celebrating a meeting of art, fashion and design, Leonardo Ferragamo (son of legendary shoe designer Salvatore) opened his Gallery Hotel Art in 1999. Discerning guests are drawn to the four-star Florentine establishment not just for its understated luxury, but the regular exhibitions it hosts, with work by artists including Massimo Vitali, Steven Klein, and the photographic duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. The boutique hotel is not alone in exploiting a convergence between art and leisure. Thanks to the efforts of some visionary hoteliers in recent years, the aesthetically minded traveler can now pick from a host of resorts where master rooms teem with masterpieces. Here is our pick of the latest and greatest:

Soho House

Among Nick Jones's empire of private clubs and hotels is The Dean Street Townhouse, a brasserie and hotel (built on the site of the Gargoyle Club, a one-time haunt of Francis Bacon) in the Soho neighborhood of London where patrons can dine alongside works by Keith Coventry, Mat Collishaw and Keith Tyson, among others. Soho House Berlin was appropriately unveiled last weekend during the city’s gallery week and features work from a range of Berlin-based artists including Kirstine Roepstorff and Cyprien Gaillard. Jones’s next outpost, Soho House Miami, opens this fall.

Hôtel Ermitage

Revered Parisian graffiti artist and hipster extraordinaire Andre Saraiva moved south last summer by buying up the old St. Tropez hotel Ermitage and revitalizing it with a little help from his friends Aaron Young, Marc Newson and Aurel Schmidt. Each of the artists has created a unique design for a room within the hotel.

Delaire Graff Estate

Diamond magnate Laurence Graff’s Delaire Graff Estate, a hotel and winery on the Helshoogte mountain pass in South Africa, opened in early 2010. In the resort’s rooms and restaurant are works by such artists as Frank Benson and William Kentridge, while the estate’s garden is an idyllic showcase for sculptures by African artists.

Art Series Hotels

Melbourne’s Art Series names, and themes, its chain of boutique hotels after renowned Australian artists. The Cullen, named after Sydney artist Adam Cullen is stuffed with animal-centric work, reminiscent of the artist’s dripping paintings of horses and marsupials. Meanwhile The Olsen (which opened on April 15 this year) is softer around the edges, in keeping with the organic feel of John Olsen’s abstract canvases. The Blackman (based on the fantasy-tinged canvases of painter Charles Blackman), opens in August 2010.

Benesse House

For the devoted art tourist, the island of Naoshima in Kagawa prefecture, Japan, offers perhaps the ultimate experience. The central location for Benesse Art Site Naoshima (an organization that is responsible for several art projects in the Seto-Inland area), Naoshima Island is crowned by two sublimely stark compounds devised by Japanese superstar architect Tadao Ando. The first, Benesse Art House, is a hotel whose rooms are decorated with work by Sol LeWitt, Josef Albers and Christo & Jeanne-Claude, among others, while the second, the Chichu Art Museum showcases a wide range of work from Monet to Hiroshi Sugimoto, and incorporates breathtaking interventions by James Turrell and Walter De Maria. Further site-specific, outdoor artworks are scattered across the island, including pieces by Yayoi Kusama and a surreal hot-tub by Cai Guo-Qiang.