Art Nouveau Palace Hotel, Prague

At a glance

Type

Art Nouveau hotel, in continuous use apart from the closure of 1986–1989

Architect

Jiří Justich (named George Justich in the hotel’s English materials)

Builder and first proprietor

František Buldra, Prague builder and hotelier

Built

Begun 1903, completed and opened 21 April 1909

Address

Panská 897/12, 110 00 Prague 1 (Nové Město)

Coordinates

50.08394° N, 14.42773° E

Overview

Prague is where Art Nouveau went ornamental. The Municipal House and the buildings along Pařížská carry mosaic, sculpture and wrought iron in quantity, and that is the version of the style most visitors come to see. The Palace Hotel is the other version. It was built in what its own records call the Viennese manner — flatter, quieter, ornament held back to the lettering, the window surrounds and the roofline.

The result is a building that reads as a whole rather than as a collection of decorated parts. It stands on the corner of Panská and Jindřišská, a few minutes from Wenceslas Square, on the seam between the Old Town and the New.

History

The site was built on long before the hotel. The hotel’s own history traces a residence on the plot to 1378, its assignment to a prince of the Kaunic family in 1776, and a later period as a second Prague palace of the Auersperg family, before it passed in the nineteenth century to a middle-class owner. That sequence comes from the hotel and has not been checked here against an independent archive; it is reported as the building’s own account of itself.

What is firmly dated is the hotel. In 1903 František Buldra, a Prague builder and hotelier, began the development with the architect Jiří Justich, working on the medieval footprint. The building was completed and opened on 21 April 1909.

Its reputation was made under the next owner. Emanuel Oppel took over in 1924 and set out to run it as a luxury house, and the Palace became a fixture of the city’s social life between the wars. Josephine Baker stayed here. So did the soprano Ema Destinnová, and Enrico Caruso, who sang with her.

The long first era ended on 1 January 1986, when the hotel closed for restoration. It reopened in 1989 — the year the country changed — and has run since.

What you see

The corner is the whole design. A shallow bay rises through the upper floors and resolves into a tower whose roof steps inward in stages before a slim spire. Below it, set into flat panels in the render, the words HOTEL and PALACE are spelled out in relief — the ornament doing the work that a cartouche or a sculpted figure would do on a showier facade.

Everything else is deliberately level. The walls are a pale green-grey, the pilaster strips flat, the window surrounds carrying low-relief bands rather than modelled foliage. The mansard roof runs a long rank of hooded dormers along both streets. At street level the shopfronts are arched, and a metal canopy reaches over the corner door, where the café still trades under the hotel’s name.

Cultural significance

Prague’s Art Nouveau is usually told through its most decorated buildings, which makes the style look like a matter of surface. A building like this one complicates that. The same years, the same city, and a facade that argues for restraint — closer to what was being built in Vienna than to what was going up along the river — showing that the movement arrived here as a set of choices rather than a single look.

Practical information

Access

A working hotel. The public rooms, including the café on the corner, can be seen without staying

Exterior

Visible from the street at any hour; the corner reads best from the Jindřišská side, where the tower is not foreshortened

Getting there

The hotel is a short walk from the foot of Wenceslas Square. Můstek station (metro lines A and B) is the nearest stop; the Jindřišská tram stop is closer still, and the Jindřišská bell tower stands at the end of the same street.