History

The street now called Gaono gatvė — named after the 18th-century Jewish scholar Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the Vilna Gaon, who lived nearby — was already documented on medieval Vilnius maps as the centre of the city’s glassworking trade. In 1547 a glasscutter named Martynas Paleckis established what is recorded as the first Lithuanian glass manufactory on this site. Workshops multiplied through the 16th and 17th centuries, giving both the street and the district the name Stikliai, the Lithuanian word for glassblowers.

The buildings fell through various uses over subsequent centuries. When three Lithuanian entrepreneurs — Anna and Aleksandras Ciupij and Romas Zakarevicius — began restoring the complex in the late 1980s, they started modestly with a small café. The project grew room by room: a European restaurant, then a series of acquired apartments, then the full hotel. The Stikliai received its five-star rating in 1995 and was inducted into the Relais & Châteaux network, becoming the first and, for many years, only such member in the Baltic states.

French interior designer Anne Toulouse shaped the current aesthetic of the public spaces and rooms, blending antique furniture with the stone walls and low vaulted ceilings of the original structures. The hotel has since expanded to include a winter garden, a glass-roofed gourmet restaurant, a tavern serving traditional Lithuanian cuisine, and a basement spa with pool and sauna.