Rosewood Vienna

The baroque dome of the Peterskirche fills the windows on one side of Rosewood Vienna, and the Graben, the old city's main promenade, is a few steps from its door. The hotel opened on 1 August 2022 in a nineteenth-century bank headquarters on Petersplatz, the first Rosewood in Austria.

History

Petersplatz is one of the oldest squares in Vienna, laid out around the church of St Peter, whose present baroque building was consecrated in 1733. The hotel's building was put up in the nineteenth century as the head office of a Viennese savings bank, one of the large stone-fronted blocks that the financial institutions of the Habsburg capital built around the Graben and the Hoher Markt. It served as bank offices for more than a century. The conversion into a hotel, with Rosewood as operator, took several years of structural work behind the retained facade, and the hotel opened in the summer of 2022.

Architecture and design

The street fronts are historicist, with a rusticated ground floor, tall windows and a cornice, and they were kept intact. Inside, the New York and Lisbon designer Alexandra Champalimaud worked from the idea of a Viennese private residence: a small entrance hall rather than a grand lobby, a lounge with a fireplace and Thonet-style chairs, Biedermeier lines in the furniture, and a palette of oak, bronze and pale plaster. The banking hall at ground level became the brasserie. On the roof, a new glass pavilion holds the restaurant and bar, with a terrace that looks across to the spire of the Stephansdom and down onto the dome of the Peterskirche.

Rooms and suites

There are 71 rooms and 28 suites, 99 keys in all, which is small for a building of this size and explains the proportions of the rooms. Ceilings run high on the lower floors, with the original tall windows; rooms on the upper floors sit under the roof with dormers. Several suites face the Peterskirche directly. The largest, on the top floors, have terraces and dining rooms.

Dining

Neue Hoheit, the hotel's restaurant name, is used twice. Neue Hoheit Brasserie occupies the former banking hall on the ground floor, serving Viennese and Central European dishes through the day and into a late supper. Neue Hoheit Rooftop, in the glass pavilion upstairs, is the fine-dining room and bar, open in the evening, with the terrace in use through the warmer months. The lobby lounge serves coffee and Viennese pastries.

Wellness

Asaya, Rosewood's wellness brand, has its first European outpost here, with treatment rooms, a sauna, a steam room and a gym on the lower floors. There is no swimming pool.

Weddings and events

The event rooms are a set of salons on the first floor, used for weddings of modest size, dinners and board meetings, with the rooftop pavilion and terrace available for private receptions. The hotel is better suited to small weddings and private dinners than to large banquets; the city's great halls are nearby for those.

Location

Petersplatz sits inside the Innere Stadt between the Graben and the Hoher Markt. The Stephansdom is a two-minute walk, the Hofburg about ten, the State Opera and the Albertina about fifteen. Stephansplatz U-Bahn station, on the U1 and U3 lines, is the nearest, and Vienna International Airport is around 20 minutes by car or 16 minutes on the City Airport Train to Wien Mitte. Among luxury hotels in Vienna it is the newest in the old city, and the one that sits closest to the cathedral.