Behind many of Prague’s most beautiful old façades are a raft of modern new hotels ideal for today’s business traveller. Mark Caswell takes a look.
Until recently Prague was seen by many as the stag-party capital of Europe, but as the rowdy crowds have moved further east to Riga, Tallinn and Vilnius, a more mature visitor has been flocking to the Czech capital to enjoy arguably the world’s most varied mix of art nouveau, baroque, renaissance, cubist and gothic architecture. There are a huge amount of hotels in the city centre, and most are housed behind wonderfully preserved façades.
The past six months have seen a flurry of new openings in the city, from five-star luxury hotels to boutique offerings and mid-market properties. One of the most recent to open its doors is the 160-room Sheraton Prague Charles Square (see overleaf for a review), the first Sheraton-branded property in the Czech Republic and the first Starwood hotel in Prague. It’s about ten minutes’ walk from the centre of the Old Town and is housed in a late 19th-century building that until recently served as the Golden Gate Hotel (some older maps still refer to the site as such).
Sheraton’s debut in Prague has been a long time coming, with Starwood having been looking for the right opportunity for the past ten years, according to Roeland Vos, Starwood’s president for Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
“For a brand such as Sheraton it’s important to be represented in key destinations, and Prague was a missing dot,” Vos says. “We were getting calls to our reservation line from guests asking where they could stay but we weren’t able to accommodate them.”
For some time Starwood has also planned to convert a property close to the Powder Gate and Republic Square. Originally it was intended to be a Le Méridien hotel, and while the brand-type is no longer certain, Vos says Starwood is still committed to opening a hotel on the site.
“The initial plan was to open a hotel in early 2011, although this has now shifted. We have a signed management contract in place – it’s a stunning property, but it’s also a listed building, so it really depends on what we can do with it,” he says.
Prague is compact enough for most hotels to be within walking distance of the main tourist attractions, but if you’re looking to be in the heart of the action then it would be hard to beat the forthcoming Hotel Kings Court, and the recently opened Buddha-Bar and Kempinski offerings.
The five-star Kings Court is due to open in July and is in an enviable location overlooking Republic Square, adjacent to the Municipal House and opposite Palladium, the Czech Republic’s largest shopping centre with more than 200 retail outlets and 30 restaurants and cafés. Formerly housing the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the extensively renovated building should provide stiff competition to its neighbour, the 100-year-old five-star Hotel Paris.
The hotel will have 136 rooms, many with views of the square, as well as an executive floor, a fine-dining restaurant, a café-bar with terrace seating, a spa with Finnish and Turkish saunas and an indoor swimming pool (a rarity in Prague), a total of five meeting spaces including a 170-sqm ballroom with a balcony overlooking the square, and a casino.
A couple of streets west of here, the Buddha-Bar brand has taken its first steps into the world of hotels. Well known for its trendy Paris bar and restaurant, which has spawned nearly a dozen spin-offs in cities worldwide as well as a range of popular CDs, the group has applied its luxury Asian-themed concept to the first Buddha-Bar Hotel.
The rich red décor in the bedrooms includes velvet furnishings, luxury bed linen, standalone mosaic bathtubs and stylish black bathrobes. It may not be to everyone’s taste but it is undoubtedly indulgent, and will appeal to guests looking for something a little different. Rooms are decked out with the latest in-room technology and the hotel also has a modest fitness centre, spa facilities, the Siddharta-Café, which has a DJ from noon onwards, and of course the Buddha-Bar itself, serving Pacific Rim cuisine and complete with a signature giant Buddha statue.
If all this sounds a bit too trendy, the newly opened Kempinski Hybernska Prague is located a couple of minutes’ walk from Republic Square and is housed in a 17th-century building that previously served as a clinic. The property is not marketed as an all-suite hotel, although 62 of the hotel’s 75 rooms are either one- or two-bedroom suites.
The lower floors of the hotel have wonderfully spacious corridors and high ceilings, and Kempinski has created a gallery feel, with modern artwork throughout the rooms and public areas. Particularly worth a look are the white statues dotted around the staircases and corridors. Nonchalantly leaning against the walls with their legs crossed, they appear to be watching your every move – if it wasn’t for the fact that they are headless.
The hotel also features the fine-dining restaurant Le Grill, as well as Two Steps Bar, which has a winter garden annex that in turn leads to a peaceful summer garden at the back of the hotel, a bonus for such a central property. From the front you would have no idea that this area exists, and in fact until the redevelopment of the property it served as a rather less attractive car park.
The Kempinski joins other luxury brands in the city including Four Seasons, located a stone’s throw from Charles Bridge, and Mandarin Oriental, which opened here in 2006. But all of these brands will be looking nervously over their shoulders at what must rank as Prague’s most ambitious hotel project in recent years.
Opening this month, the Rocco Forte Collection’s the Augustine has managed to fuse together no less than seven existing buildings – the oldest dating back to the 13th century – a new-build restaurant and lobby, several courtyards, and even a working monastery.
The 101-room property is located across Charles Bridge to the west of the city, an area described to me by the representatives of more than one hotel in the Old Town as “the wrong side of town”, although I failed to see how a property in easy walking distance of the stunning Prague Castle and next to the peaceful Waldstein Gardens could be the wrong side of anything. The interior designer, Sir Rocco Forte’s sister Olga Polizzi, has included furniture and furnishings inspired by the country’s cubism era, in rooms that are understated yet scream quality from every nook and cranny.
It would be impossible to mention every feature and quirk of the Augustine, but stand-out elements include the Tower Suite, which has possibly the best 360-degree city view of any hotel I have visited; spacious hallways in several of the buildings, with alternate fake doors to mimic the original layout of the monk’s quarters; and the Brewery, an underground cellar-style bar serving “Bohemian tapas” and a beer that will be brewed by the resident monks, just as it was up until 1952.
Guests will also be able to enjoy “eco-chic spa facilities”, Tom’s Bar, which has original frescos and 25 types of rum, a sundial garden adjacent to the monks’ current quarters, and the Monastery restaurant, incorporating protected trees in its new-build walls.
It’s not only luxury and boutique properties joining Prague’s hotel scene. Vienna International Hotels and Resorts, a group with properties in countries including Austria, Poland and Croatia, recently rebranded an Express by Holiday Inn property in Praha 1 as the three-star Chopin Hotel. Meanwhile, the Rezidor Hotel Group, already represented in the city under its Radisson SAS brand, has added a second property with the opening of the Park Inn Prague in March.
At first glance, the 210-room property might not seem to have the best location, being situated a fair way south of the city’s main attractions, but this brings its own advantages. The Prague Congress Centre is five minutes’ walk away and the hotel is also located at the foot of a hill housing the beautiful Vysehrad Unesco world heritage site, which affords wonderful views back across the city to Prague Castle, Petrin Park and the Vltava river.
The hotel is also part conversion and part new-build, combining a striking art nouveau façade with a new six-floor wing. The building was formerly a publishing and printing house, and the designers have retained this industrial feel by using a rust-effect finish on the lobby walls and lifts, while paying homage to the written word with a huge mural behind reception that welcomes guests in dozens of languages.
Rooms are simply decorated with splashes of bright red, and facilities include RBG Bar and Grill, which serves “healthy, fresh and affordable food”, five meeting rooms with a maximum capacity of 135 delegates, and a top-floor fitness centre with views of the Old Town.
Something most of these new properties share is a lack of large conference spaces. This is down to architectural restrictions and the fact that Prague remains largely a leisure destination. One exception is the recently opened Aquapalace Hotel, part of the Vienna International group, and located in one of Europe’s largest waterparks on the outskirts of the city. The 231-room hotel hopes to attract both leisure and business clientele, with spa facilities and direct access to the park combined with a modern conference centre that can accommodate up to 650 delegates and includes a ballroom with its own garden.
It’s been a busy period for Prague’s hotel scene, but then again all of these projects were announced well before the global economy took a nosedive. The real test will be whether the city will be able to continue to expand during the downturn – several projects, including a proposed Accor property, have already been delayed or indefinitely postponed.
Even so, for the consumer, Prague now offers a wide range of excellent hotels, whether you are looking for a global brand, a trendy nightclub on site, or a pint with the local monks.
