The Most Design-Forward Hotels to Book in Madrid Right Now

In 1906 a bomb meant for Alfonso XIII and his new queen sailed past their wedding procession. The king survived, shaken—and embarrassed, because the visiting royals found nowhere worthy to sleep. Paris had a Ritz. London had a Ritz. Madrid had its pride. So he bankrolled one: César Ritz lent his name, Charles Mewès and Luis de Landecho drew the plans, and the Hotel Ritz opened on Plaza de la Lealtad in October 1910. Two years on, the king coaxed the Belgian financier Georges Marquet into raising the Palace across the Plaza de Neptuno—some 500 rooms in 18 months, briefly the largest in Europe. The two faced off across the boulevard while Lorca, Dalí, and Mata Hari drifted through. A Gran Vía boom followed in the ’20s; then decades of quiet, as Barcelona seized Spain’s design reputation after its 1992 Olympics and Madrid’s grandes dames slid toward dowdy.

That lull is over. Madrid holds the 2026 European Best Destination title and, this September, hosts Formula 1’s return after a 45-year absence; its hotels have matched the new tempo by reviving the past instead of building anew—convents, banks, and ducal palaces reopened behind protected façades, handed to architects most capitals keep for their museums. For a design or art lover, location is strategy. The Prado, Thyssen-Bornemisza, and Reina Sofía line the Paseo del Arte; ARCO and Madrid Design Festival take over each winter; the galleries stretch from blue-chip Salamanca to postindustrial Carabanchel. Choose a barrio by appetite—Salamanca for the shopping mile, Las Letras for the museums, Chueca and Chamberí for the long lunch.

1. Mandarin Oriental Ritz, Madrid

Spain’s young king Alfonso XIII nursed a grudge against his own capital—nowhere grand enough to lodge his 1906 wedding guests—so he bankrolled the cure himself. César Ritz, the Swiss hotelier whose Paris original had invented modern luxury, lent his name and his architect, Charles Mewès, and the Hotel Ritz opened in October 1910 facing the Prado, Spain’s treasure-house of Velázquez and Goya. The 2021 revival kept faith with that origin: Madrid architect Rafael de La-Hoz steadied the century-old bones while the Parisian decorating duo Gilles & Boissier repainted the fantasy in apricot and celadon, and the garden reclaimed its post as the city’s most contested lunch reservation. In Deessa, the gilded dining room, Quique Dacosta—the Valencian chef with three Michelin stars at his coastal flagship—holds two more.

2. Nômade Temple Madrid

The Mexican group behind Tulum’s most photographed barefoot retreats has traded jungle canopy for the Gran Vía, Madrid’s great early-century boulevard of theaters and follies. Its perch is a 1917 confection by local architect Cesáreo Iradier, so admired on completion that the city handed it a construction prize, and lately known as the literary-themed Hotel de las Letras. For its first venture beyond Mexico—and its first in a city anywhere—Nômade let Oneness, its in-house studio, drape incense-route textures over the protected plasterwork of ninety-odd rooms. A dining room cooks over live flame, tracing a line from Liguria through Montevideo to the castizo grill; a café in the spirit of the old Spanish bodegón idles below, and the GÖN spa sinks a hammam and a cryotherapy chamber into the cellar.

3. Rosewood Villa Magna

Salamanca, Madrid’s stateliest shopping-and-embassy quarter, treats Villa Magna as commons: the 1972 landmark where the barrio’s bankers proposed, divorced, and remarried returned in fall 2021 under Rosewood, the Hong Kong–run flag that does luxury in a residential register. Spanish architect Ramón de Arana recomposed the façade, Australia’s BAR Studio tuned the interiors to a domestic murmur, and Madrid designer Alejandra Pombo furnished rooms whose grandest suites trail terraces vast enough for a string quartet. The British consultancy ArtLink seeded the corridors with more than 380 works, a rolling syllabus of Spanish painting between elevator and door. At Amós, Jesús Sánchez—the chef whose Cenador de Amós in green northern Cantabria carries three Michelin stars—transposes that coastal cooking south, anchovies and all.

4. Four Seasons Hotel Madrid

Every Spanish highway is measured from Kilómetro Cero, the brass plaque steps from the door, so call this the country’s most central hotel; geography agrees. Estudio Lamela—the Madrid practice that co-designed the soaring Terminal 4 at Barajas airport—fused seven landmarked bank buildings into one address, salvaging some 3,700 original fittings along the way: teller counters, stained glass, marble columns the lenders abandoned. Four Seasons claimed the result in September 2020 for its Spanish debut, parceling the floors among a relay of studios from San Francisco’s BAMO to London’s Martin Brudnizki. The spa stacks four stories, the largest of any city hotel in Spain.

5. The Madrid EDITION

Nobody wants to break first on a pool table milled from a single block of marble, so the French designer Emmanuel Levet Stenne’s lobby centerpiece mostly gathers admirers and negronis. The hotel arrived in April 2022 courtesy of Ian Schrager, the New Yorker who co-founded Studio 54 and then more or less invented the boutique hotel; he hired Britain’s high priest of minimalism, John Pawson, for the architecture and the French designer François Champsaur to thaw the rooms with curves and Mediterranean color. The kitchens carry passports. Enrique Olvera, Mexico’s most influential chef and the mind behind Mexico City’s Pujol, steers Jerónimo; the Peruvian Diego Muñoz answers with ceviche and pisco at Oroya; the Punch Room pours by candle-glow.

6. Thompson Madrid

Beneath the lobby, inside the 200-year-old shell of the deconsecrated Church of San Luis Obispo, a piano bar called Jack’s Club has been marrying cathedral acoustics to gentlemen’s-club manners since November 2025. That basement is the showpiece of a wholesale dining reset at Hyatt’s first European Thompson, which arrived in 2022 in two historic buildings braided around twin courtyards off the Calle de la Montera. The Madrid studio López y Tena dressed the rooms in leather and dark timber, hanging canvases by Nicolás Villamizar, the painter who signs his work “Ä.” Upstairs, the local restaurant group Lamucca handed its fire-driven rooftop, MAKÁÁ, to Madrid interior designer Patricia Bustos, who sheltered it beneath 305 plants; tapas land at sidewalk level at La Barra de Ultramarines, and an infinity pool surveys the terracotta between.

7. Gran Hotel Inglés

Calle Echegaray has lubricated three centuries of literary sparring—the tabernas here once hosted the poet Federico García Lorca’s circle going at it till dawn—and its anchor since 1886 is Madrid’s oldest luxury hotel. New York’s Rockwell Group, a studio as fluent in Broadway sets as in dining rooms, steered the 2018 resurrection into full Art Deco: jade tile, lacquer, brass that flatters anyone after midnight. Just 48 rooms keep the scale conspiratorial, and a spa by the Parisian skincare house Sisley absorbs the previous evening’s enthusiasms.

8. Hotel Único Madrid

For 15 years the pilgrimage ended at the two-Michelin-star table of Ramón Freixa, the Catalan chef who made this Salamanca palacete a dining destination with rooms attached. When he decamped at the close of 2024—his new Atelier nearby reclaimed both stars within a year—Único declined to clone him. In came El Patio de Claudio, where the Bogotá-born, Bocuse-trained Mario Vallés cooks a Spanish bistró menu in a wicker-and-stripe room by the Marbella designer Maria Santos, and lunch dissolves into sobremesa with nobody retrieving a phone. The 19th-century house sits deep in Salamanca’s golden shopping grid, hiding a walled garden that ambushes first-timers rounding the lobby corner.

9. URSO Hotel & Spa

Madrileños book Media Ración weeks out and only afterward remember there’s a hotel upstairs. The restaurant belongs to the Cuenllas family, keepers of one of the city’s oldest gourmet shops, and the menu honors the house name with half-portions—cockles, caviar, croquetas, cheese by the quarter-wheel—so appetite can wander. The frame is a 1915 palace by society architect José María Mendoza y Ussía, converted in 2014 on the seam where stately Chamberí frays into Malasaña’s small hours. Antonio Obrador, the Mallorcan designer who conjured the Cap Rocat hotel from an island fortress, let the wrought iron and marble breathe under Nordic light.

10. Brach Madrid

Philippe Starck, France’s most prolific designer, has decided the resident of this Gran Vía pile is an imaginary man archiving the woman he loves—hence the mandolins, boxing gloves, and love-letter graffiti strewn through the bedrooms. The conceit has history on its side: Victor Hugo, future author of Les Misérables, lodged on this ground as a boy. The 1920s building by Madrid architect Jerónimo Pedro Mathet Rodríguez became the first address beyond France for Evok, the Parisian group behind Brach’s original, in January 2025. Chef Adam Bentalha’s Mediterranean sharing plates land in a room pitched between brasserie and private salon, jatoba wood glowing terracotta by evening. Below, the La Capsule wellness floor stretches a 65-foot pool toward an infrared sauna and a hyperbaric chamber for guests optimizing toward immortality.

11. SOR Hotel

In the 1600s it sheltered women trying to leave what the city primly termed a dissolute life: the convent of Santa María Magdalena, known as Las Recogidas. Decades as the headquarters of Spain’s UGT trade union followed, then emptiness after 2018, and this autumn the building reopens as a 42-room hideaway in Chueca, Madrid’s loudest and most liberated quarter. A penitents’ cloister now sells serenity, and the neighborhood savors the irony. Pulitzer handed the renovation to Isay Weinfeld, the São Paulo architect behind the Fasano hotels and a master of warm, monastic calm, for his Madrid debut: noble stone, low light, rooms named Lumen. The old cloister has become an aromatic garden by landscape designer Fernando Martos, where water and birdsong carry; the deconsecrated church, rechristened El Coro, hosts dinners.

12. Casa de las Artes

Cervantes shadows every floor. Engravings from Gustave Doré—the 19th-century French illustrator whose images fixed Don Quixote in the world’s imagination—hang in all 137 rooms, Salvador Dalí’s lithographs from his own Quixote series hold the lobby, and the novel’s first edition was printed a few doors away. Meliá, Spain’s largest hotel group, opened this as its Collection flag’s Iberian debut in May 2024, inside a 1913 building by Ricardo García Guereta and José María Otamendi, recast by ASAH Studio’s Álvaro and Adriana Sans. A heated pool waits below, a library hung with portraits of Spanish writers invites loitering, and a pocket cinema named for the trailblazing director Pilar Miró screens on request.