The Court Opera had been open for a year when the Grand Hotel Wien received its first guests across the road on the Kärntner Ring in 1870. It was the first hotel of the grand type on the Ringstrasse, the boulevard Emperor Franz Joseph had laid out on the line of the demolished city walls, and the name was meant literally: a hotel to match the opera, the Musikverein and the palaces going up around it.
History
The hotelier Anton Schneider commissioned the building and Carl Tietz designed it; it opened in 1870 with some 300 rooms, one of the largest hotels on the continent at the time. After the Second World War the building's story took an odd turn: from 1957 it housed the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which stayed until its move to the new United Nations complex on the Danube in 1979. The Japanese airline All Nippon Airways then bought the empty building, restored it over several years and reopened it as a luxury hotel in Vienna in 1994 under the ANA name. Since 2002 it has belonged to JJW Hotels & Resorts, the group of Sheikh Mohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber.
Architecture and design
Tietz's facade is a textbook piece of Ringstrasse historicism, with a rusticated ground floor, balustraded balconies and a heavy cornice, and it is a listed monument. The interior was rebuilt almost entirely in the 1990s behind that front, but the marble staircase, the chandeliers and the mirrored salons follow the original manner rather than the taste of the decade that made them. The top floor was given over to a restaurant with a terrace on the Ring, which is where Le Ciel now sits.
Rooms and suites
The hotel has 205 rooms and suites. Those on the Ring side look at the Opera and the trams passing below; the quieter rooms face inward. Furnishing is classical, with pale walls, inlaid wood and silk, and the suites on the upper floors are the largest in the house, some with their own view of the Opera's roof.
Dining
Five restaurants and a bar share the building. Le Ciel by Toni Mörwald, on the seventh floor, holds a Michelin star for French cooking built on Austrian produce and has a terrace over the Ring. Unkai, opened with the hotel in 1994, was among the first serious Japanese restaurants in Vienna and keeps a sushi counter and teppanyaki tables; Unkai Sushi is its smaller offshoot. The Grand Café on the ground floor is a Viennese coffee house in the classic mould, the Grand Brasserie serves Austrian dishes through the day, and the Kavalierbar is the hotel bar.
Wellness
The Grand Spa has a gym, saunas and treatment rooms. There is no pool.
Weddings and events
The ballroom and a series of salons take weddings, balls and conferences. The Opera being opposite, the hotel is a natural address for receptions after performances, and the Vienna ball season in January and February fills its rooms with guests of the balls held across the city.
Location
Kärntner Ring 9 is on the Ringstrasse between the Staatsoper and the Hotel Imperial, with the Ringstrassen-Galerien shopping arcade attached to the building. Kärntner Strasse, the pedestrian street to Stephansdom, begins at the Opera; the Musikverein is 300 metres away across the Ring; the Albertina and the Hofburg are five minutes on foot. Karlsplatz, where the U1, U2 and U4 meet, is the nearest underground station. Vienna Hauptbahnhof is about 2.5 kilometres south, and the airport at Schwechat 18 kilometres east, 16 minutes on the City Airport Train from Wien Mitte.
