PRICE:
Frommer's Highly Recommended

Set immediately across the same street from one another, and owned and developed by the same charming and somewhat eccentric entrepreneur (Per Hellsten, an ongoing player in Sweden's music industry), these hotels share some of the same staff members and a lot of similar artistic aspirations. The residential neighborhood they occupy is the newly fashionable Vasastaden, a short walk northwest of the close-to-everything Stureplan. The more intriguingly furnished and more expensive of the two is the (four-star) Hellsten Hotel, which maintains a commercial recording studio in its cellar. Originally built in 1898, it was conceived as a red-brick textile mill. Amid the skylights, the sheets of glass, and the unusual Asian and African furniture and art, you'll still see traces of the original decor, including old-fashioned linen closets in unexpected cubbyholes and white-ceramic wood-burning stoves. Bathrooms are sheathed with slabs of dark-gray stone imported from a quarry in Greece. Bedrooms (except for those on the uppermost floor, which have sloping ceilings and, in some cases, exposed wooden beams) have lavish plaster detailing on their ceilings and many hints of their original 19th-century grace. About a dozen of the rooms contain four-poster beds and original-to-the-building white-tile ceramic stoves. Rooms with particular idiosyncratic charm include nos. 1105, 1200, and 1207. The three-star Rex is the less opulent of the two hotels, without the exotic sense of decorative fantasy that's the norm at the Hellsten -- it's comfortable, though. The building that contains it once functioned as the headquarters of the Swedish Lutheran Church. Rooms throughout the hotel are efficiently but not plushly decorated, in stark contrast to the more lavish digs at the Hellsten. Accommodations on the topmost floor are among the smallest in the hotel.

Copyright: Excerpted from Frommer's Sweden, 6th Edition, (c) 2008, Wiley Publishing, Inc.

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