Hotel of the Week: Mandarin Oriental Transforms a Vienna Landmark

Maybe the most important detail to know about the just-opened Mandarin Oriental hotel in Vienna—a city on par with Paris as the world’s most pastry mad metropolis—is that pastry chef Christian Grübler formerly worked at the Michelin three-starred Steirereck, the capital’s best restaurant and a place that’s internationally renowned for the excellence of its bread and confections. Rightfully, the Viennese themselves have been visiting the hotel in droves to sample the cakes on its instantly famous pastry cart (don’t miss the pistachio tart), and enjoy a coffee in an elegant setting for just a few Euros, a clever decision by Mandarin Oriental to lure the locals and boost its buzzy atmosphere.   

It’s details like this that explain why the Mandarin Oriental has immediately become part of the elite club of the best hotels in the Austrian capital, one of the Old World’s great hotel cities. Perfectly sited just off the Ringstrasse and a street away from St. Stephen’s Cathedral as well as other Viennese landmarks like the Hofburg palace, the Burgtheater, and the Golden Quarter, the hotel occupies the former Commercial Law Courts building of Vienna, a 1908 Art Nouveau masterpiece by architect Alfred Keller.

It took ten years to convert the building into a hotel since stringent historic preservation requirements necessitated the delicate renovation of the period stonework and stucco that gives the structure its visual identity, as well as the restoration of the tall double-paned windows originally designed to catch the city’s light during its long winters.

Design studio Goddard Littlefair—also responsible for reimagining spaces at Gleneagles in Scotland and the Gran Marbella in Spain—took visual inspiration from the Wiener Werkstätte movement (the group, influenced by Gustav Klimt and founded in the early 1900s, railed against mass-produced consumer goods). This translates to retro chandeliers and mirrors combined with streamlined contemporary furniture in soothing tones of almond and ivory with dove-gray leather finishes and powder-blue accents.

Parquet floors in a glorious Pannonian oak herringbone support beds made up with some of the most sumptuous sheets in the world, the swaddling 500-thread-count cotton sateen of Bavaria-based Mühldorfer. Spacious white marble baths come with Diptyque toiletries and decadent oversize soaking tubs.

To create the seven-room spa with indoor pool, two stories of excavations were completed under the existing building. Here, guests can luxuriate with signature treatments, like the 90-minute Music and Movement massage, which was inspired by two of the city’s most illustrious musicians, Mozart and Strauss, whose piano sonatas delicate infuse the atmosphere.

Beneath the hotel’s historic glass dome executive chef Thomas Seifried leads the hotel’s four distinct dining venues, from the French-Asian seafood dishes served at Le Sept—try the halibut cordon bleu—to a brasserie, an izakaya, and a café that nods to Vienna’s much-loved coffeehouse tradition.