Promus' inviting artwork.

• Author: Ferling, Rhona L.
• Position: Corporate Gallery: The Promus Companies' Collection - Cover Story

When you walk into the restored Southern mansion that serves as the Promus Companies' reception center, you're immediately enveloped by the sense of quality and permanence that pervades the artwork. Hospitality is part and parcel of Promus' hotel business, a philosophy that even finds its way onto the walls and into its public spaces. In the reception area at the company's Memphis, Tenn., headquarters, many of the paintings, such as Francis Louis Mora's "The Tea Party" and several impressionist works, not to mention the collection of antique furniture, are vivid reminders that good living is an art in itself.

This theme assumes a distinctly international flavor at Promus' main office building, where you can feast your eyes on a collection of sculpture, decorative arts and artifacts representing the countries where Promus operates. Curator Mary Jane Fuller confides she's partial to a 19th-century French tapestry that once served as a backdrop for a traveling puppet theater. The employees, for their part, favor a six-foot wooden statue of an African senufu bird from the west African nation Cote d'Ivoire. And they've affectionately christened a pair of pre-Colombian figures, each of which is holding a sphere, as "the bowling team," Fuller says.

Of course, not every piece exerts its charm so successfully in a corporate environment. Fuller recounts the saga of a Japanese piece the company once owned. Originally, the large wooden gate was designed as a portal into a garden. "Half of it was in New York and the other half was in a warehouse in Texas," she explains. Both halves were shipped to Memphis, where a local company that puts together theater sets took on the job of assembling it.

The restoration challenges didn't end there. The...