Hotel Impérial — Prague
The Café Impérial on the ground floor has the most extraordinary tiled interior in Central Europe — a single room where every surface from floor to ceiling is covered in hand-painted faience dating to 1914.
At a glance
Built between 1912 and 1914 to designs by Alexander Hanuš in a transitional Art Nouveau–Art Deco style, the Hotel Impérial stands on Na Příkopě — the old moat street that marks the boundary of Prague’s medieval city. The building’s seven-storey facade is distinguished but not exceptional. Its ground floor is something else entirely: the Café Impérial, opened in 1914, is lined from floor to ceiling in hand-painted Rako ceramic tiles — walls, pilasters, vaulted ceiling, every surface covered in a programme of Neo-Byzantine, Orientalist, and Art Nouveau botanical motifs that was executed over two years without a break in pattern.
Key facts
- Built: 1912–1914; architect Alexander Hanuš
- Style: Art Nouveau transition to Art Deco; Byzantine ceramic programme in the café
- Address: Na Příkopě 15, 110 00 Prague 1, Czech Republic
- GPS: 50.0887, 14.4400
- Status: Operating four-star hotel; Café Impérial open to the public
- Unique feature: Café Impérial — the most complete ceramic interior of the era surviving in Central Europe
History
Na Příkopě (“On the Moat”) was the most fashionable commercial street of early 20th-century Prague, equivalent to Vienna’s Ringstrasse in urban ambition. The Hotel Impérial was commissioned as a prestige address to compete with the existing grand hotels of the old city. The commission to design the café interior went to a team of craftsmen from the Rako ceramic works in Rakovník; their two-year programme produced over 30,000 individual ceramic elements, each painted by hand and assembled into a continuous programme of botanical, zoomorphic, and geometric motifs derived from Byzantine, Islamic, and Central European folk traditions simultaneously.
The café survived the Communist period without significant alteration — its ceramic interior was too expensive to remove and too distinctive to ignore. A careful restoration was completed in 2007 in preparation for the hotel’s reopening, cleaning the tiles to their original luminosity and repairing the handful of damaged sections. The café reopened as a landmark venue that immediately re-established its role as the most visually remarkable public interior in central Prague.
What you see
The street facade is in a late Secession idiom — restrained, with Art Nouveau ironwork on the balconies and a roofline silhouette that references the baroque skyline of the Old City without imitating it. The café interior is the architectural event: the vaulted ceiling rises seven metres above the marble floor, every centimetre tiled. The principal motifs are Byzantine peacock tails, Art Nouveau botanical fronds, and Orientalist geometric borders — an early 20th-century synthesis of all available historic vocabularies.
Practical information
The Café Impérial is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner without hotel reservation. Best visited at midday when the light enters through the tall windows. The hotel is a 10-minute walk from Old Town Square and 5 minutes from the Municipal House (Obecní dům), the finest Art Nouveau building in Prague.
Find it on the map
See this place and what’s around it →📷 Diventa un fotografo di Cultural Heritage Online
Condividi le tue foto dei luoghi: restano pubblicate con la tua firma come autore. Più vengono viste, più ti fai conoscere — e presto un concorso premierà le foto più apprezzate.
Accedi o registrati gratis per aggiungere una foto