Where to Stay in All Museum

★★★★★

Museum Mile's house hotel — the Art Deco tower off Madison where presidents and princesses slept, Bemelmans' Madeline murals glow at cocktail hour, and the Met waits a ten-minute stroll up Fifth. New York's museum weekend, done in style.

★★★★★

The hotel of presidents on Michigan Avenue — a 1910 Beaux-Arts landmark facing Grant Park with the Art Institute a ten-minute walk north and the Field's Museum Campus a lakefront stroll south. Chicago's museum weekend, bracketed.

★★★★★

The bank the presidents used, reborn as Penn Quarter's handsomest hotel — Romanesque vaults, a cocktail bar in the actual basement vault, and the Smithsonian's free museum row a fifteen-minute walk down to the Mall.

★★★★★

The WWII Museum's own hotel, directly across the street — 1940s Art Deco down to the Rosie-themed rooftop bar, built and named for the man whose boats won the beaches. The full-day museum visit, with the commute deleted.

★★★★★

Back Bay's townhouse grande dame on Commonwealth Avenue — suites with French doors, a century of family ownership, and the MFA, Gardner palazzo, and Fenway's cultural row all inside a fifteen-minute walk or one Green Line hop.

★★★★★

The art hotel on the museum mile itself — Logan Square's polished base where the Benjamin Franklin Parkway runs past the door to the Rocky Steps, with the Barnes two blocks off and a rooftop bar watching the whole cultural boulevard.

★★★★★

The Getty's nearest bed — a garden boutique on the Bel-Air side of Sunset at the 405, five minutes from the museum tram, with resort calm, canyon views, and the Westside's art circuit (and UCLA, and the beach) fanned around it.