The lobby of the 21c Museum Hotel in Durham, N.C., was designed by Deborah Berke to showcase art. 

Deborah Berke’s appointment last year as the first female dean of the Yale School of Architecture might have brought her into the limelight, but the architect and interior designer had already been getting attention for her work on 21c Museum Hotels, a small chain of boutique properties doubling as art galleries.

Ms. Berke’s foray into hospitality started in 2005 when the contemporary art collectors Steve Wilson and his wife, Laura Lee Brown, who wanted to engage the public with art in a unique way, hired her to convert five 19th-century warehouses in a run-down area of downtown Louisville, Ky., into a 90-room hotel and contemporary art museum......Continue Reading

> via New York Times