History

The Marmorosch Blank Bank was one of the powerful financial houses of early twentieth-century Romania, and its new headquarters was meant to say so. The bank turned to Petre Antonescu, the architect who would later give Bucharest its Arcul de Triumf, and to Anghel Saligny, the engineer of the Cernavodă bridge over the Danube. Design work began in the early 1910s; construction ran from 1915 to 1923, a window that straddled the First World War and the occupation of Bucharest.

Antonescu delivered a banking palace in the Neo-Romanian manner — the national style that was Romania’s answer to the era’s search for architectural identity across Europe — layered with Byzantine references and, in the later phases, Art Deco detail. Inside, the painter Cecilia Cuțescu-Storck contributed murals for the bank’s representative spaces. The result was judged, in the words of the SHARE Architecture Awards jury a century later, “an eloquent example of bank architecture of traditional inspiration of the early XX century”.

Between 2018 and 2021 the palace underwent a full consolidation and restoration led by CUMULUS ARCHITECTURE, with restoration works by DANART and interiors by YES Architecture & Design, at a cost of roughly EUR 42 million. It reopened in August 2021 as The Marmorosch Bucharest, Autograph Collection. The strong room that once held the bank’s reserves was kept and converted: it is now The Vault, the hotel’s bar.