Prague: Our Hotel

The hotel we stayed in on our return trip to Prague was really interesting so I thought I would include a post on it.  When we took a shuttle to the hotel the first night, he couldn’t get very close to it because of the crowds at the Christmas Market on the Old Town Square.  So the driver just sort of dumped us off and pointed across the visitor-packed square and said nebulously, “it’s over there.”  So we set off with our luggage in the general direction the driver was pointing.  We couldn’t find street names (which are traditionally on the sides of buildings) or numbers.  But we finally found a hotel that just said “hotel” on it (see below) and finally realized that must be it.  (We later discovered that the name of the hotel is on the front of the building but in the winter when the patio is covered, it’s not really visible from the street.  If you look carefully behind the heater on the patio, you can see it.)  But then we couldn’t find an entrance.

The hotel is this building and the adjacent building on the left.

 

It turns out the entrance is through the White Horse Restaurant, which is in the front of the hotel and owned by the hotel.  The downstairs Romanesque cellars that date back to the 12th century and have nightly life jazz and blues concerts are also owned by the hotel. If you say “hotel” to the hostess out front, she’ll let you walk straight back through the “outdoor” patio portion of the restaurant with it’s fur cushions and blankets on the chairs (covered in the wintertime and open patio the rest of the year), and then through the inside of the restaurant, way to the back where there’s a locked wrought iron gate leading to some stairs.

The locked gate is on the right in this photo. You finally know you’re in the right place because it says “Old Town Square Hotel” on the huge door mat.

 

When you press the buzzer (on the wall to the right), the gate opens and you can go up the stairs where you are greeted by a desk clerk standing at the top of the stairs doing a visual security check.

 

These 2 strange chairs, very low and very shallow, are sitting in a little lobby.

 

There’s no elevator in the building so fortunately we’re on the second floor which of course is also the floor the lobby is on.

Before we go into our room, let me tell you a little more we learned about the hotel. As I said earlier, the hotel is made up of this building and the adjacent one to its left. Both buildings are registered on the UNESCO list of monuments because this is the only house in Prague that contains a preserved ribbed vault.  And this ribbed vault dates back to 1496 when the buildings underwent an extensive reconstruction.  An architect self-portrait and the year 1496 are printed on one of the vaults.

The hotel was completely renovated in 2004 and now contains 10 rooms and suites ranging in size from 600 to 1,100 square feet.  It is referred to as a “palace,” and although it doesn’t really seem like a palace, it does contain many characteristics of a palace.  The ceilings are very, very high, probably 24-26 feet.  The rooms contain double doors at either end making the rooms interconnecting if desired, which was typical of most palaces.  Of course they didn’t originally have bathrooms, and having a  UNESCO designation puts restrictions on what and how changes can be made.  The added marble bathrooms  are very modern and look like they were just dropped into the rooms.

With the tall ceilings, the room just feels gigantic. There are 2 desks in the room but neither one has a lamp.

 

This shows the outside of the inserted marble bathroom. There’s a glass ceiling in the bathroom so it’s totally enclosed, but you can see the bathroom ceiling doesn’t reach up to the room ceiling. Besides this high chandelier and the minimal lights in the bathroom, the only lights are 2 adjustable but unstable lights on the bed’s headboard.
There’s a sofa and a second desk as well as a little breakfast table and chairs. Behind the table and chairs is one of the double doors that allows the rooms to be interconnected; there’s a second one to the left of the sofa. There are 3 small freestanding “closets” and 3 full-length mirrors.

 

There was no breakfast room at this hotel like in most. Here, the night before,  we indicated our choices on a form containing breakfast options and specified a desired breakfast time and the breakfast was delivered and transferred to our table.

 

One thought on “Prague: Our Hotel”

  1. Entering the hotel through the restaurant is something different and the room looks modern except for the high ceilings, especially the bathroom. The breakfast looked yummy.

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