When guests check into the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, they are not just greeted by front desk staff, but two plasma screens showcasing a video collage of city scenes collected from the camera that sits perched on their roof.

As guests wheel their suitcases to their rooms at the Hotel Murano in Tacoma, Wash., they take notice of a corridor brightened by intricate, hand-blown glass creations.

And, at Portland, Ore.'s newest hotel, The Nines, a 30-foot chandelier made of glass, LEDs and steel hangs over the eighth floor's grand stairwell.

The trend of intertwining striking art in a hotel setting has been a growing trend since the 1990s, says consultant Joan Warren-Grady, who shaped art collections for the Fontainebleau and Regent hotels on Miami Beach and luxury hotels worldwide.

''Original art collections . . . help set each hotel apart, making it one-of-a-kind,'' she says. ``Guests take away a memory of their hotel experience, and a visual memory is a very powerful one that helps bring the guests back.''

That exposure to museum-quality art with the price of a room is especially welcome in today's economy. And it helps create a distinctive sense of place.

''[Hotels] are basing their interior and artworks on local flavors because that's why people travel to their destination: To experience something they don't have in their home place. Artwork can tell a story within a room,'' says Donna Watson-Rossmoore, associate vice president and director of interior design at the Orlando office of top hospitality architects, WATG.

TREASURES ABROAD

This isn't just a U.S. trend. At the Hotel Windsor in Nice, artists including Lawrence Weiner and Raymond Hains were given carte blanche to stamp their own personal designs on half of the property's 57 rooms, whether whimsical flowers or a Babar-inspired room. Hand-painted frescoes brighten up the other rooms.

In Madrid's Salamanca neighborhood, the Petit Palace Art Gallery hotel incorporates an art gallery is its premises; if contemporary pieces like a shiny cow in the lobby aren't exactly what guests have in mind, the hotel offers discount tickets to the nearby Reina Sofia contemporary art museum.

In Rome, Guido Angelo Terruzzi, art collector and owner of the Rome Cavalieri, has dipped into his private stash to outfit the hotel with more than 1,000 pieces, including a triptych from Giovanni Battista Tiepolo that was snared for the highest price ever paid at an art auction in Italy's history -- $8 million. The collection is so vast that hotel has created an mp3 tour.

Stateside, in art-obsessed Chicago, local museum curators helped the Park Hyatt Chicago's shape its collection of black-and-white photographs from local artists, an aluminum sculpture from Isamu Noguchi, a glass original from Dale Chihuly and Gerhard Richter's Piazza del Duomo.

From the video art projects displayed on the inner courtyard to the rotating works featured in the high-traffic business lounge, The James, also in Chicago, brims with unexpected visuals. ''When we selected some of the pieces, it was really to tie the whole Chicago experience together,'' says GM Patrick Hatton. He singles out the mural in the ballroom, a chalk skyline of the city on black canvas created by a young artist, DeMarkus Purham, tapped through the mayor's inner city arts program.

CLOSE TO HOME

Here in South Florida, the recently revitalized Fontainebleau Resort celebrates the spirit of its original architect, Morris Lapidus, and his commitment to featuring thought-provoking art with contemporary works including light installations from James Turrell and Yves Klein's Venus Bleue sculptures. The Sagamore -- also on Miami Beach -- is known as the ''the Art Hotel'' for its wide-ranging displays of 500 works by more than 50 artists, from Yoko Ono to Massimo Vitali. Guests ''are being exposed to the collection in a very close and intimate encounter,'' says the hotel's Cricket Taplin.

``During a time when things are difficult, art is what takes us away into another world for a brief moment.''

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