The annual drive to Eastern Europe to look at hotel developments is becoming more fascinating each year. I have been working my way from north to south, from Peenemunde to Prague. Now however the drive brought me to one of the newest countries in the world, Slovakia. Its capital, Bratislava, claims the title of ‘Europe’s youngest capital’ and as one of the three Hapsburg Imperial centres of the Austro-Hungarian Empire stands with Vienna and Budapest in a triangle straddling the Danube.

Vienna is a beautiful city, a wedding cake confection; Budapest is more down to earth but full of vitality and with a sense of its own importance and history; Bratislava is unsure of itself, devastated by its doctrinaire socialist past, but with a charm and an innocence of its own. The new country came into being in 1993, and needs a sense of is own identity, to develop its awareness of its own history and culture. The Carlton is adjacent to buildings making a key contribution to this sense of identity – the National Theatre (housing the opera) and the National Gallery, but the hotel itself has its own place in Slovakian history and in the heart of Bratislava’s citizens.

The redevelopment of an historic hotel going back to 1836 would be a major event in any city. When this redevelopment happens after many years of socialist oppression, it becomes a symbol of a new era. The prominent location of the Carlton, its scale and sophistication makes it a landmark building in this city. With an inheritance of architectural awfulness, with its face to the Danube pitted and ugly, Bratislava is dominated by doctrinaire architectural developments and scarred by planned destruction of its past. This included renaming the Carlton the ‘Moscow’. Some of the destruction of the old town was at the hands of socialist planners who left the city with an ugly legacy of housing blocks in Petržalka housing 150,000. The communists destroyed much of the centre of town in building the approach roads to the Nový Most (New Bridge) but much was simply the failure of the socialist economy which led to 25 years of decay.

Architecturally the hotel sits well alongside the National Opera (rollover to compare). The image top left shows the inheritance is Austro-Hungarian Empire with echoes of the art nouveau or Viennese Secessionist movement apparent in some of the still neglected city centre buildings.

Empress Maria Therese is reputed to have died inthe hotel. A room has been fitted in the style of the period, but with inappropriate wallpaper, carpets and joinery, reducing a tribute to merely a room furnished with old furniture...

The hotel decayed to the extent that its very existence was in doubt as the buildings came close to collapse. Local historic building enthusiasts and architectural conservationists joined together to try to rescue the building and part of it began operating again as an hotel in the late 1980’s, only to close again in 1992, returning to the cycle of decay. In 1998 the building began to be resurrected opening in late 2001 as a rejuvenated Carlton. With characteristic vision Rezidor SAS put €40million into the redevelopment of the hotel as a five star flagship, retaining the external appearance and gutting the interior, retaining few of the internal features of the original hotel.

The commercial decision to invest was bold. The architectural redevelopment has created a visual centre to an important part of old Bratislava and restored an iconic and historic building that compliments the equally architecturally extravagant National Opera close by. These achievements are not matched by what has been achieved in the interiors. A sense of grandeur has been achieved in reception, but if the intention was to achieve the feel of a grand hotel (which historically the Carlton certainly was) on a par with the Meurice in Paris, or the Amigo in Brussels (see both in our Review Archive), the pedestrian nature of much of the interior design fails to achieve the desired result.