21c Museum Hotel, Bentonville

The original 21c Museum Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky was ample proof of the notion that a well-executed boutique hotel with a contemporary art focus could thrive in, if not quite the unlikeliest of American towns, then not exactly the likeliest, either. And the new 21c Museum Hotel Bentonville goes one further: its namesake town of Bentonville, Arkansas, is no precious artist’s colony, but the heartland home of the Wal-Mart retail mega-chain.

Then again, maybe Bentonville’s not such a curveball. Say what you will about Wal-Mart as a cultural signifier, but the Walton family itself is the force behind the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a first-class museum, and an architecturally distinguished one at that — not to mention one that’s open to the public, free of charge. It doesn’t take much more than that to kickstart a thriving art scene, and if the 21c is evidence of anything, it’s evidence of that.

It’s also a very fine hotel, on its own merits. The 104 rooms, designed by architect Deborah Berke, are clean-lined, crisp and contemporary, yet never sacrifice comfort or coziness — they’re more or less everything you’d want from the letter C. The Hive is the restaurant and bar, serving fresh and local American country cuisine in a communal setting, and the cocktail bar is proof that Louisville isn’t the only place to go looking for bourbon and rye. And with twelve thousand square feet of exhibition space, also open to the public, the 21c happens to be a first-class contemporary art museum in its own right.