The Grand Budapest Hotel—Remixed
With punchy colours and funky art juxtaposed against historic architecture, the new W Budapest brings 21st-century personality to one of the city’s most beautiful buildings.
Standing sentinel opposite the Hungarian State Opera House on Andrássy Avenue, the so-called Champs-Élysées of Budapest, the new W Budapest—formally known as Drechsler Palace—cuts an impressive figure with neo-Renaissance flourishes and a romantic, soaring château-style roof. But Budapest is a city of gorgeous historic buildings. It’s only inside that you see what makes this one so special.
The 151-room W Budapest can be poetically described as a remix. Think of it as the visual equivalent of the chords from a turn-of-the-century waltz rearranged and reworked into a rap song. Built in 1885 as luxury residences for around 25 families, many of the building’s architectural bones remain either untouched or restored to their original glory, overlaid with a second skin of modernity and fresh style care of London-based interior designers Bowler James Brindley and Budapest’s Bánáti + Hartvig Architects.
The entry foyer is a perfect example. A double-sided sweeping staircase under vaulted ceilings and framed-in stained-glass windows steals the eye, while clever contemporary lighting and a metallic mesh archway add of-the-moment personality. The old-world courtyard is another example, enclosed with a modern, undulating glass roof and dressed with minty-green velvet settees and sofas with pillows, ballerina-pink and striped like peppermint candies.
Pops of pink appear throughout, not just in the courtyard but also in the Instagram-bait lobby bathroom, paying tribute to the famously feminine Hungarian American socialite Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Master of illusions Harry Houdini—another famous Hungarian—is also a design source, best observed in the subterranean spa, which uses fun-house-style mirrors to add the illusion of space and a sense of intrigue. Another point of inspiration is the ballet, as Drechsler Palace once leased space to the Hungarian State Ballet Academy. To pay homage, guest room bathroom mirrors are lined with bulbs like backstage dressing room mirrors, and W Budapest’s two signature suites (the drenched-in-black Extreme Wow Suite and almost-all-white Wow Suite) are meant to evoke the dichotomic swans of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. (Both also come with fully stocked bars and a nightly bartender, because it’s still the W, after all.)
In the hotel’s only restaurant, Nightingale by Beefbar, oversized light features are abstract representations of tutus. Also in the restaurant, nods to the famous Hungarian pastime of chess appear in the upside-down chess piece lights and black-and-white chessboard floor. Some guest rooms even include bespoke ultrafuturistic chessboards designed by British creative Ronan Mckenzie.
