Palais Hansen Kempinski Vienna

The Hotel

The Palais Hansen was built in 1873 by Theophil Hansen, the Danish-Austrian architect responsible for the Austrian Parliament Building (1874, 83), the Musikverein concert hall (1870), the Vienna Stock Exchange (1877), and most of the great Ringstrasse historicist set-pieces. The building at Schottenring 24 was commissioned for the Vienna World Exposition of 1873 as a hotel; the Vienna Stock Exchange Crash of May 1873, the same one that triggered the Long Depression, broke the original hotel financing, and the building never opened as a hotel. For the next 137 years it housed offices, a Habsburg-era ministry, post-war Austrian administrative bodies, and, latterly, a financial-sector tenant. Wertinvest Hotelbetriebs and Gerstner Hospitality acquired the property in 2008 and restored it from 2010 to early 2013; Kempinski took the management contract; the hotel opened on 4 March 2013, 140 years after the building was first conceived as a hotel.

The 152 rooms (including 17 suites) are arranged across the six-floor building, with category configurations that vary widely between the historic envelope rooms (high ceilings, original moulded plasterwork, Ringstrasse-facing windows) and the post-restoration insertions in the rear courtyard wing. Standard rooms run 28, 35 square metres; Deluxe Rooms at 35 sqm are the most-booked upgrade; Junior Suites at 50, 70 sqm; the named suites (the Hansen Suite, the Beethoven Suite, the Ringstrasse Suite, the Presidential Suite) range from 90 to 220 square metres. The Presidential Suite occupies a corner of the historic envelope with the original 1873 ceiling restored intact and a Ringstrasse view through three sets of full-height windows. Interior architecture is Boris Podrecca's restoration: the heritage envelope preserved; contemporary insertions (oak, leather, brass, restrained palette) calibrated not to compete with the historicist ceilings.

Edvard, the hotel's headline restaurant, named for Edvard Munch's friendship with Hansen, has held one Michelin star continuously since 2014. Chef Daniel Hubmann runs a contemporary Austrian-Scandinavian menu in the small (32-cover) ground-floor room with a glass-walled kitchen pass; the wine programme is uncharacteristically deep for a Vienna hotel, with a deep Burgenland focus alongside the expected Champagne and Burgundy work. Die Küche is the all-day Austrian room (terrace seating onto the inner courtyard in summer); Lobby Lounge handles the afternoon programme; The Living Room, a separate ground-floor space, is the bar with the city's best Negroni programme on the Ringstrasse. The hotel's spa runs to 1,000 square metres on the basement floor: 18-metre indoor pool, sauna, steam, fitness centre, and six treatment rooms.

The market position is clear. The Schottenring address, at the western end of the Ringstrasse, opposite the Vienna Stock Exchange and three minutes from the financial district, is the city's most considered business-luxury postcode. The building's 1873 envelope and Theophil Hansen authorship are the differentiators against the Imperial, the Sacher, and the Ritz-Carlton (also Ringstrasse but in different historicist palaces). Edvard's Michelin star is the consistent dining proposition. Kempinski's service standards are the operating frame. For travellers who want the Ringstrasse, the imperial-Vienna architectural reading, and a contemporary five-star operating standard simultaneously, Palais Hansen Kempinski is the answer.

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