PRICE:
Frommer's Exceptional

Originally built in 1846 as the outrageously elegant, and even more outrageously ostentatious private home of the Coburg dynasty (who managed somehow to sire most of the monarchs of western Europe), this sprawling and staggeringly historic building -- except for its exterior -- was gutted and rebuilt during a six-year renovation that was completed in 2006. Prior to its present incarnation, it needed lots of time and attention. Much of its interior had been bashed and vandalized by the Russian army after their occupation of the site after World War II, and after that, it functioned as the headquarters of a dull Austrian bureaucracy associated with the State Railways. But all traces of the mundane have definitely been banished since its transformation into a multi-purpose building, only part of which is devoted to hotel accommodations. The lavish renovation of the building's foundations, most of which date back to the Middle Ages, has created nine different meeting spaces for private dinners and conventions. There's both a formal restaurant (dinner only) and a somewhat less expensive bistro (breakfast, lunch, and dinner), which is appealingly centered within a greenhouse-inspired building on the palace's terrace, high above the street level of the nearby Marriott Hotel. The full-service spa is reserved only for residents of the hotel, and then there are those suites: The smaller and less expensive are contemporary, intensely design-conscious, and very comfortable. The more expensive evoke the heyday of the Rothschilds and are posh, with many pale satin upholsteries and valuable antiques. Ironically, all this grandeur is the personal property of an (individual) Austrian investor, whose stated ambition involves the on-site compilation of the largest and most comprehensive wine collection in Europe. It's stored within the deepest of the building's medieval vaults (and they go very deep, indeed). Some, but not all, of the collection is tantalizingly visible through Plexiglas skylights set into the top of some of the cellar's vaulting.

Copyright: Excerpted from Frommer's Vienna and Danube Valley, 7th Edition, (c) 2008, Wiley Publishing, Inc.

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