Augustine, A Luxury Collection Hotel

The Hotel

The Augustine occupies seven historic buildings within the precincts of the St Thomas Augustinian monastery in Malá Strana, four minutes' walk below Prague Castle. The Augustinian order has been continuously present on this site since 1284; the monastery brewery has produced the St Thomas beer since 1352, making it among the longest continuously operating commercial breweries in the world. The hotel was developed in 2009 by Rocco Forte Hotels in partnership with the still-operating monastery; the order retains three of the buildings and the working brewery, while the hotel occupies the remaining four — including a 13th-century chapel, a 16th-century guest house, a 17th-century Baroque wing, and an 18th-century classical addition. In 2018 Rocco Forte exited the management contract; the property has since 2018 operated under Marriott's Luxury Collection.

Olga Polizzi — sister of Sir Rocco Forte and the design director who shaped the original Forte conversion — produced the interiors. The decision was distinctive: rather than a generic European luxury vocabulary, the rooms reference Czech Cubism, the early-twentieth-century artistic movement that Prague itself originated and that produced the only Cubist architecture, furniture, and applied-arts programme in the world. Decorative pieces, light fixtures, fabric patterns, and several pieces of bespoke furniture across the public rooms and key suites are drawn from this vocabulary. The result is a heritage hotel that feels distinctively Czech rather than internationally luxe — a rare achievement in Central European hospitality.

The 101 rooms and suites are spread across the four hotel-occupied buildings. Standard rooms run to 25 square metres; Deluxe and Junior Suites larger; the Tower Suite — the property's flagship — occupies a small Baroque tower with views across the monastery garden to the Castle. The most distinctive booking is in the historic guest-house wing where the rooms are shaped around the original masonry, with low timber-beam ceilings, deep sash windows, and original parquet underfoot. The Refectory restaurant runs the Czech-modernist kitchen of chef Marek Fichtner — the menu reads as venison, carp, dumplings, and the seasonal Czech vegetable programme treated at one Michelin star level (the kitchen has held a Bib Gourmand for some years and the dégustation menu is the city's most considered approach to traditional Czech cuisine). The bar is in the historic monastery refectory; the lobby cocktail bar is in the cloister; the St Thomas brewery — accessed through the monastery courtyard — is the source of the in-house beer.

The position is among the strongest in the city: the lower entrance to Prague Castle is six minutes' walk uphill; the Charles Bridge is seven minutes downhill; the Wallenstein Garden is two minutes; the Lobkowicz Palace and the Vrtbovská Garden are both within five. Service holds to the Luxury Collection standard — careful, knowledgeable, and unusually well-versed in the monastery and city's history because of the property's connection to the still-active religious community. The Augustine remains the heritage-density choice in Prague: no other listed property anywhere in the city offers the combination of an active monastic order on the same site, a private medieval brewery, an original archive turned into the hotel library, and an interior design programme drawn from a uniquely Czech artistic movement.

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