From House To Home

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It doesn’t require the sensitivities of a princess sleeping on a mattress under which a suspicious queen has placed a pea to realize that the furnishings provided in hotel guest rooms affect the quality of our travel experience. While you may receive an adequate night’s sleep in an accommodation filled with traditional furnishings, imagine the energy you will awake with when you spend the night in one of the following hotels.

Lancaster Arts Hotel, Lancaster, Pennsylvania

It’s kind of ironic that guests aren’t allowed to smoke in a hotel that was once a tobacco warehouse, but the Lancaster Arts Hotel is more than a historic boutique hotel. It’s an art gallery of hand-crafted furniture as well as other forms of two- and three-dimensional art, both functional and decorative, made predominantly by craft artisans from Pennsylvania.

The John J. Jefferies bar is made out of old tobacco lathes that were once used to hang tobacco leaves to dry in one of the 100 tobacco warehouses that once dominated business in Lancaster. Two lobby chairs were designed by the hotel’s architect to incorporate the image of a large tobacco leaf.

Everything in the hotel is for sale—even the bed you sleep in.

Light up your imagination by visiting www.lancasterartshotel.com.

Butler House B&B, Des Moines, Iowa

Sarah Grant started her custom furniture business by picking up sticks and other pieces of driftwood along the riverbanks around Des Moines—thus the company name “Sticks.“ Over the last decade, she has contributed to the unique decor of a number of public buildings and hotels throughout the Midwest, most recently the Butler House Bed and Breakfast in Des Moines. In furnishing the Butler Master Suite, one of seven guest rooms in the B&B, she helped create a Designer Show House that raised funds for the Des Moines Symphony.

Pick up your sticks at www.sticks.com or spend the night at www.butlerhouseongrand.com.

Sheraton Wild Horse Pass, Chandler, Arizona

Sleeping with a cactus doesn’t sound that appealing—that is, until you step into the guest rooms at the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass in Chandler, Arizona, a southern suburb of Phoenix. Incorporating the bones, or ribs, of the massive saguaro cactus into the panels of nightstands, entertainment units, and window cornices brings a bit of the Southwest, and more specifically, the culture of the Pima and Maricopa tribes, into the resort’s décor. The entire resort is a museum, of sorts, to these influential natives of the region.

Although the furniture is not for sale, other home décor items created by the Pima and Maricopa are found in the resort’s gift shop. And remember to enjoy the resort’s signature Gila River Margarita, also made of saguaro cactus, at the lobby lounge bar. Poke around the resort at www.wildhorsepassresort.com.