Edward Hopper’s Western Motel Is Being Turned Into a Hotel Room at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Some paintings are so good you can’t help but wish you could climb right inside of them and experience the details with all five senses, in all three dimensions. If Edward Hopper’s Western Motel brings about those sorts of feelings for you, now is your chance to live that dream.

As part of an exhibition called “Edward Hopper and the American Hotel,” Artnet News reports that the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) is constructing a real, live motel room modeled on the artwork that you can actually book for a night.

Much like Nighthawks and Hopper's other paintings, 1957’s Western Motel isn’t exactly a warm and cozy depiction of the hospitality industry. The featured room—which is furnished with two sturdy red sofas, a chair, a small table, and a reedy lamp—is so neat it seems almost characterless. A well-dressed woman with impeccable posture perches atop a couch, looking expectant. It evokes the sense of alienation that permeated so many of Hopper’s influential pieces focused on life in the modern world: lonely people hunched over tables and gazing out windows, failing to connect with their surroundings in a way that makes you, the viewer, uncomfortably aware of your own static energy.

While pieces like Western Motel seem to hint that Hopper himself was something of a gloomy introvert, exhibition curator Dr. Leo G. Mazow hopes that "Edward Hopper and the American Hotel" will set the record straight. The exhibition "endeavors to consider hotels, motels, and other transient dwellings as vital subject matter for Hopper and as a framework with which to understand his entire body of work," Mazow stated in a press release.

In addition to 60 of Hopper’s works and another 35 from his contemporaries, the exhibition will also feature diary entries and postcards from Hopper’s wife and fellow artist, Josephine. As the press release explains, these artifacts "humanize the artist and his wife, providing detailed accounts of their travels in their own words and personal responses to the places they visited, their experiences there, and how these trips informed their art."

The "Hopper Hotel Experience" will offer a number of different packages that, in addition to spending a night at the museum in a room modeled after Hopper's painting, will include everything from dinner at Amuse, the VMFA’s fine dining restaurant, to a guided tour of the exhibition with Mazow.

Information on how to book an overnight stay will made available closer to the exhibition's October 26th opening. But you don’t have to commit to a museum sleepover in order to step inside the artwork; you can also just take a walk around it during museum hours.