Prestige Hotel Budapest, Vigyázó Ferenc utca 5 — a Locally Protected Town House of Lipótváros

History

The street was first called Bélagasse, recorded in 1829, and Béla utca from 1874. In 1929 it took the name of Count Ferenc Vigyázó, who had died in July 1928 and whose will left his entire fortune to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the institution whose palace stands close to the head of the street. The houses that went up here in the 1830s and 1840s are the work of the builders who shaped reform-era Pest. The national register describes number 4 as a three-storey classicist house by József Hild of 1837, and number 3 as a classicist house by Ferenc Kasselik of 1837 with work by Hild in 1841. Hild, born in Pest in 1789 and died there on 6 March 1867, was the most prolific architect of the city in his time; in his lifetime the old Kirakodó tér on the river, today’s Széchenyi István tér, was built up entirely to his designs.

For number 5 the only detailed account we have found is the hotel’s own. It states that the house was built in the 1860s to Hild’s plans, as one of his late works, and that after his death it was finished by the architect Lőrinc Zofahl in an early eclectic style, probably for the merchant Albert Spitzer. That sequence runs into a problem of dates. The Magyar Életrajzi Lexikon places Zofahl’s activity in Pest mainly between 1831 and 1843, and Hungarian Wikipedia, citing his funeral notice, gives his death as 5 September 1863, three and a half years before Hild’s. Either the building was completed by someone else, or it was begun earlier than the hotel says, or the attribution is mistaken. We have not seen the building permits, which would settle it; the published list of Hild’s buildings that we consulted does not include number 5.

The later history also comes from the hotel. Once the residential use ended the house served as offices. In 2004 the courtyard parts were demolished, the street wing was kept, and a new reinforced-concrete structure was built behind it to plans by Zoltán Porcsalmi for flats that were never completed; only the shell was finished. Hotel conversion began in 2014 to plans by Péter Hegedűs and Ágnes Bolyó, and the hotel opened in April 2015. By 2012 at the latest the house was already on the district’s list of buildings protected for their part in the streetscape, and it is on the current list of individually protected buildings, as set in 2021. Under that decree a protected building may not be demolished entirely, and alterations need a documented assessment of its values.