You run an independent hotel, you are choosing the art yourself, and you want to see one painting before you order forty

This page is written for the person who owns or runs an independent hotel with roughly 8 to 120 rooms — an inn, a townhouse hotel, a country house, a pub with rooms, a lifestyle property on a single site — and who is choosing the art personally, or with a small interior studio, without an art consultant in between. You are not filling a brand-standard kit; you want a mix that tells the property's story, with a bar or lobby piece that guests photograph and a run of guest rooms that feel related but not identical. You are buying on your own timetable, often between the end of one season and the start of the next, and paying against a proforma invoice.

Independent hotels source art this way — owner, designer or small practice deciding, rather than a corporate buyer — and increasingly want originals on the wall rather than mass-produced prints ¹. What follows answers the five things that usually go wrong, and what we actually do about each.

Not you? If you are buying for a branded group to a specification that repeats floor by floor, read the page for hotel groups buying to a brand standard. If your project is a restaurant or bar on its own, read restaurant groups & bars. Serviced apartments and aparthotels have their own page, as do resorts and beach hotels.

What goes wrong: ordering forty paintings from an overseas website on the strength of a screen image is a real risk, and most suppliers make you commit to a minimum before you have held anything in your hands.

What we do: the minimum order is 1 piece, so a sample is simply a one-piece order. Choose the work you want in your first finished room, tell us the size and finish, and we quote it within 1 business day. It is painted in about a week, and while it is on the easel you receive progress photos or video at each stage and approve before the painter continues. It ships insured and arrives 3–7 days later. Hang it in the room, look at it with the bedding, the paint and the lamps on, and decide.

When you go ahead with the rest, the approved sample is the reference for the whole order: the same studio paints the run, and your later progress photos are checked against the piece you already have. Nothing you saw on the sample changes on the volume order except quantity, and volume pricing applies from 10 pieces. If the sample is wrong for the room, you have spent one painting finding out, not forty.

What goes wrong: without a designer, a catalogue of 1,455 works is not a help, it is a wall of thumbnails, and the fear is of choosing pieces that fight the room.

What we do: we do not offer a design service and will not pretend to. What we can do is narrow the catalogue for you. Send a photo of a typical room wall with the bed made and the lights on, the room count, and one word about the mood you want — calm, warm, moody — and we reply with a short list of catalogue works that already carry the relevant tags: 681 works are tagged Guest Room & Suite, 404 of those are tagged Peaceful, 163 Cozy & warm, 139 Romantic. The same slices are browsable as pages: Guest Room & Suite, Restaurant & Bar, Impressionist, Peaceful, Cozy & warm, and every one of the 16 colour families, for example beige or green.

Two practical rules that owners without a designer find useful. First, pick one or two styles for the bedrooms and stay inside them; a property reads as considered when it repeats a painter's hand rather than a single painting ². Second, order the sample room before the rest, as above, and let the piece on the wall — not the thumbnail — make the decision. Progress photos then catch anything that drifts from that reference before it ships.

What goes wrong: the properties you admire have a different original in every room. Getting there by commissioning local artists one at a time means forty conversations, forty invoices and forty delivery dates, and the rooms still have to look as though they belong together.

What we do: one brief, one studio, one date. The catalogue is deep enough that a 60-room hotel can have 60 different works inside one or two styles: 125 Impressionist works and 160 Textured & Plaster works are tagged for guest rooms alone, and 92 Impressionist works are tagged for corridors. Where you want rooms to rhyme rather than differ — a floor of suites, both sides of a landing — the Vary route builds a small series off one catalogue piece, so two or four canvases read as related without repeating. Palette changes and variations on any catalogue piece are the normal case, not an exception, because nothing is held in stock and every piece is painted for its order.

Every one of those pieces is painted in any size you specify; the catalogue sizes are precedents, not a menu. Sizes above 2 metres and panoramic formats are normal for a bar wall or a stair.

What goes wrong: you have a paint card, a headboard fabric and a stone sample, and the painting you like in a catalogue is the right composition in the wrong colours. Prints cannot be changed; a gallery original cannot be changed either.

What we do: the Recolour route keeps the composition and paints it in your palette. Send whatever you already hold: a fabric cutting photographed in daylight, paint codes, a stone or timber reference, or a scheme board. The painter works to those references, and you check the match from progress photos or video at each stage — colour is corrected while the piece is on the easel, before it ships, not after. You can start from the colour family nearest the scheme — the catalogue is indexed across 16, from beige and cream to teal and black.

Two honest notes. A phone screen and a canvas under your room lighting are not the same thing, which is another reason the sample room comes first. And a hand-painted piece varies slightly from its progress photo and from its sibling in the next room; on an independent property that variation is the point, and the certificate of authenticity that ships with each piece records it as an original.

What goes wrong: a large share of hotel art is produced in bulk to a decorator's specification, and guests can tell ³. For a property whose whole proposition is that it is not a chain, a framed print above the bed contradicts the story, and a review that mentions it is hard to argue with.

What we do: there are no prints and no stock. Every piece is an original hand-painted canvas, signed by the artist and shipped with a certificate of authenticity. The painters train inside Siji Art Hub's exhibition programme in Foshan (more than 50 exhibitions, with professors of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts among the exhibitors), which is the answer when a guest asks who painted it. It also gives you a sentence for the room card and the welcome folder that does not need stretching: the painting in this room is an original, painted for this hotel, signed by the artist.

On the question owners type most — local artists or hand-painted from China — the honest answer is that the two are not exclusive. A local artist is the right route for one or two pieces with a story tied to the town. What a studio with 1,455 works offers is depth, one delivery date and consistent quality across sixty rooms, and the stage-by-stage photos mean you see the paint before it leaves. We do not claim the work is locally inspired unless you brief it that way.

What goes wrong: the rooms are stripped in January and open again in March, the decorators leave on a fixed date, and an art supplier who says "four to six weeks, roughly" is a supplier you cannot plan around.

What we do: dates are committed in writing at quotation. For a single piece the numbers are fixed: about 1 week to paint, 3–7 days in transit, 10–13 days door to door. For a 20- or 60-piece order the single-piece figure is not the whole-order figure; send the quantity and the reopening date with your enquiry and the quote states the delivery date we commit to. Multiple pieces are usually delivered together in one insured consignment.

1. Brief. You send the room count, wall photos, sizes, finish and any palette references (see the checklist below).
2. Quote. Within 1 business day, with the lead time and delivery date in writing. There are no public prices; volume pricing applies from 10 pieces.
3. Proforma. You pay against a proforma invoice and painting starts.
4. Sample. If you have asked for one, it is painted, approved from progress photos, shipped and hung before the run is painted.
5. Painting with approval. Progress photos or video at each stage; the painter continues only after you approve.
6. Delivery. Free, insured, tracked, by DHL, FedEx or USPS. Framed pieces arrive boxed with hooks; rolled pieces arrive in a tube for your local framer.

Practical advice for a closure window: order the sample as soon as the closure date is fixed, place the run once the sample is approved, and leave a buffer before the decorators leave so the pieces are hung by the people who painted the walls.

A complete first email means the quote comes back complete, in 1 business day, with no second round. Send:

1. The room count and a short list of spaces (doubles, suites, dining room, bar, entrance), and whether you want a sample room first.
2. A photo of each typical wall with the furniture in place, and the wall width and ceiling height.
3. The size you want per space, or the wall size and we suggest one; any size can be painted.
4. Palette references if you want a recolour: paint codes, a fabric cutting in daylight, a stone or timber sample.
5. The finish per space, from the table below.
6. The delivery address, and the date the rooms must be dressed by.

Finishes can be mixed within one order and chosen per piece, so a wood frame in the garden rooms and black in the bar is one order, not two.

The counts below are live from the catalogue and describe the slices owners of independent hotels use most. Guest rooms lean on Impressionist and Textured & Plaster work in Peaceful and Cozy & warm moods; dining rooms take Still Life and floral work; the bar takes the one piece guests photograph, usually Moody or Dramatic and larger than the rest. Verticals dominate — 511 of the 681 guest-room works — because they sit above a headboard or a console; 80 guest-room works are square, which suits a pair over twin beds.

• Guest rooms: Guest Room & Suite, 681 works; of these 404 Peaceful, 238 Uplifting, 163 Cozy & warm, 139 Romantic.
• Dining room and bar: Restaurant & Bar, 525 works; 267 of these are Cozy & warm or Moody; 66 are Still Life.
• Entrance and reception: Lobby & Reception, 557 works; 112 Textured & Plaster; 95 panoramic.
• Landings and corridors: Corridor & Circulation, 447 works, 435 of them vertical; 92 Impressionist.

Thin areas, stated plainly: Maximalist is a small style (12 works in the whole catalogue), so a lounge that wants dense pattern is better served by Colorful (110 guest-room works) than by filtering on Maximalist. Horizontal formats over a wide bed are a Resize of a vertical you like, not a filter: only 62 guest-room works are painted horizontal as catalogued.

A private members' club, a social club with bedrooms, or a pub with a dining room and six rooms upstairs buys much as an independent hotel does, with two differences: the walls want to look collected over time rather than bought as one lot, and rooms open in stages. Both are covered by the same facts.

Salon walls. Sizes and frame finishes are chosen per piece within one order, so a salon hang can mix 61 × 51 cm (24 × 20 in) portraits in gold with 122 × 91 cm (48 × 36 in) landscapes in wood and a square in black. Subjects for a lounge or bar are there at volume: 62 Figurative & Human and 54 Animal & Wildlife works are tagged Restaurant & Bar, 76 works are tagged Cultural & Folk, and 42 Animal & Wildlife works are painted in the Hyperrealism style. Moody (127) and Cozy & warm (172) dominate the bar-tagged moods.

Rooms that open later. Because the minimum order is one piece and nothing is discontinued, the library can be dressed this year and the four new bedrooms next year from the same catalogue codes, in the same or shifted colourways, each piece signed and certified. Progress photos work the same way for one piece as for forty.