Anantara New York Palace Budapest Hotel

Anantara New York Palace Budapest Hotel occupies the New York Palace, the eclectic office building that the New York Life Insurance Company raised on Budapest's Grand Boulevard in 1894, and whose ground-floor cafe became the most famous coffee house in Hungary. The hotel is a palace in the literal sense, built to impress rather than to lodge, and converted only in 2006.

History

The New York Life Insurance Company commissioned its Budapest headquarters in 1892 and completed it in 1894, choosing a site on the Erzsébet körút section of the boulevard then being laid out. The architect was Alajos Hauszmann, who later rebuilt the Royal Palace on Buda hill, working with Flóris Korb and Kálmán Giergl. The New York Café opened in the building the same year, and it became the daily workplace of Hungarian writers and editors around the turn of the century: the circle of the journal Nyugat, Ferenc Molnár, Dezső Kosztolányi and others. According to a story the hotel still tells, Molnár threw the cafe's key into the Danube so that it could never close.

After the Second World War the cafe was used as a sporting goods shop and later reopened as a cafe under the name Hungária, while the upper floors housed offices. The Italian Boscolo group bought the building, restored it over several years and opened it as a hotel in 2006. It later traded as the New York Palace under The Dedica Anthology, and in 2021 came under the Anantara brand, operated within NH Hotel Group as part of Minor Hotels.

Architecture and design

The facade is a dense eclectic composition of Italian Renaissance and Baroque motifs, with a corner tower, sculpted figures and a dome, built to advertise the solidity of an insurance company. The New York Café on the ground floor is the showpiece: a double-height hall of twisted marble columns, gilded stucco, ceiling frescoes and bronze lamps, restored to its 1894 appearance. The hotel interiors above take a contemporary route, with a glazed atrium in the former inner courtyard.

Rooms and suites

The hotel has 185 rooms and suites arranged around the atrium and along the boulevard, with the largest suites in the corner of the building beneath the tower.

Dining

The New York Café serves from breakfast through the evening and draws queues of visitors. The hotel runs two further venues, including a restaurant on the atrium level and a bar.

Wellness

The spa in the lower floors has an indoor pool, saunas, treatment rooms and a 24-hour gym.

Weddings and events

The hotel has eleven event rooms, from a ballroom in the former banking hall to smaller boardrooms, and states a capacity of up to 600 guests for its largest configurations. Weddings and galas use the historic halls and the atrium; conferences use the suite of meeting rooms on the same floor.

Location

The hotel is at Erzsébet körút 9 in the seventh district, on the Grand Boulevard near the Blaha Lujza tér metro station, with the theatres of the boulevard and the Jewish quarter within walking distance. By car, Budapest Ferenc Liszt International Airport takes about 30 minutes and Keleti railway station ten. For a luxury hotel in Budapest with a literary history, no other address compares.