Brenners Park-Hotel & Spa

The Lichtentaler Allee runs for two kilometres along the Oos stream through the middle of Baden-Baden, and the hotels of the town's nineteenth-century heyday stood beside it. Brenners Park-Hotel & Spa in Baden-Baden is the luxury hotel in Baden-Baden that survived with its standing intact, a cream-coloured building in a private park on the allee, owned by the same family for more than eighty years.

History

The site began as the Hotel Stephanie-les-Bains in 1834, in the decades when Baden-Baden was the summer capital of Europe, its casino drawing royalty and Russian novelists. Anton Alexander Brenner, a tailor from the town, bought the hotel in 1872 and his family rebuilt and enlarged it, giving it the name it carries. The Brenners sold to the Oetker family of Bielefeld in 1941, and Rudolf-August Oetker made it the foundation of what became the Oetker Collection, the group that includes Le Bristol in Paris and the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc. The hotel added the Villa Stéphanie in 2015, a spa in a separate villa in the park, and the medical centre Haus Julius beside it. The restaurant Fritz & Felix replaced the formal Park-Restaurant in 2018.

Architecture and design

The main building faces the allee across lawns and old trees, with the Oos stream at the edge of the park. Interiors follow the grand hotel tradition: a fireplace hall, a winter garden, corridors hung with paintings and furnished with antiques, and rooms in pastel fabrics with views over the park. Villa Stéphanie is a nineteenth-century villa rebuilt inside for the spa, with a pool, saunas and treatment rooms over several floors and a room that can be fully disconnected from electrical and digital signals for a night's sleep.

Rooms and suites

There are around 100 rooms and suites, most facing the park and the allee, with the largest suites on the upper floors. Decoration is classical, with silk, parquet and marble bathrooms, and some suites keep period furniture from the Brenner years. Rooms in Villa Stéphanie are booked by guests on spa programmes.

Dining

Fritz & Felix serves modern cooking from an open kitchen and a grill in a room that is less formal than its predecessor. The Wintergarten handles breakfast and lunch with the park in view, the Kaminhalle, the fireplace hall, serves afternoon tea, and the Oleander Bar is the hotel's evening room, named for the plant on its terrace. The Salon serves a lighter menu for spa guests.

Wellness

Villa Stéphanie is the reason many guests come. It spreads over 5,000 square metres with an indoor pool, a sauna floor, a gym, treatment rooms and a ladies' spa, and Haus Julius next door houses doctors for check-ups, dentistry and medical programmes. The thermal springs of Baden-Baden, the Friedrichsbad and the Caracalla baths, are a ten-minute walk through the town.

Weddings and events

Brenners hosts weddings in its salons and in the park, with ceremonies possible in the garden in summer and receptions in the public rooms. Meeting rooms serve boards, seminars and the dinners that accompany the Festspielhaus season. Room names and capacities should be confirmed with the hotel.

Location

The hotel stands on Schillerstrasse at the Lichtentaler Allee, five minutes on foot from the Kurhaus and the casino and ten from the Festspielhaus, Germany's largest opera house. Karlsruhe/Baden-Baden airport is about 15 kilometres away, Frankfurt airport around 180 kilometres and 90 minutes by road, and Baden-Baden station, on the Rhine valley line with ICE and TGV services, is seven kilometres from the hotel in the Oos district.