History

The site on which the Grand Hotel stands was previously occupied by an Empire-style police headquarters — the building where the writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born in 1836. Efraim Hausmann, a Lviv entrepreneur, commissioned Erazm Hermatnik to replace it with a hotel that would match the standards of the great European grand hotels of the era. When the Grand Hotel opened in 1894 it offered electric light throughout — in all public rooms and in every guestroom — as well as running hot and cold water and a central heating system: amenities that set a new standard for the city. An adjoining covered shopping passage, known as Hausmann Passage, connected Svobody Prospekt through to Doroshenka Street and Sichovych Striltsiv Street, turning the hotel block into a miniature commercial galleria.

The communist period brought two successive renamings: first as the Hotel Lviv, then as the Verkhovyna from 1964. The building survived Soviet rule intact and underwent a first post-independence renovation in 1991–1992. A more thorough reconstruction carried out between 2014 and 2018 restored the Neo-Baroque exterior and modernised the interior to contemporary luxury standards. A stained glass panel by Hryhorii Komskyi, installed during the earlier renovation, was preserved throughout the second restoration.

The 2018 reopening introduced one of the hotel’s more attention-grabbing details: a suite with BDSM-inspired theming, referencing the literary legacy of Sacher-Masoch, whose name and work gave rise to the word masochism. The hotel is one of just two of the 25 luxury hotels of the Austro-Hungarian and Polish interwar periods in Lviv that still function as operating hotels.