Plans for a Palace Hotel

In January 1922 several newspapers reported that a Swiss company planned to purchase the Neue Burg and redevelop it into a “hotel on the grandest scale”. Although the reports were later officially denied, they cannot simply be dismissed as a newspaper hoax. There were clearly preparations to use the largely empty, still incomplete Neue Burg as a “palace hotel”. This is shown by extensive and precise plans for a hotel development dating from December 1921. They were made by Ludwig Baumann, the last “Castle Architect of his Majesty the Emperor”, who was responsible for all architectural matters relating to the Hofburg, even years after the fall of the Monarchy. The coloured architectural drawings with detailed descriptions of the rooms show a luxuriously furnished, five-storey palace hotel with over 246 guest rooms in the Middle Tract of the Neue Burg. In addition to restaurants, cafés, conversation salons and tea rooms, there were to be reading rooms, swimming pools, baths, and hairdressing and manicure salons to offer hotel guests every imaginable luxury. A dedicated hall with gymnastic and fitness equipment was also available for the guests to exercise in. In the curved galleries of the staircase near the Heldenplatz there were to be two concert halls.

The idea of using the former imperial residence as a hospitality business was revived a few years later. In 1924 and 1925 the banking house Topolansky applied for 24 rooms on the second floor of the Neue Burg in order to open a pension for members and guests of the Vienna State Opera and State Theatre and for diplomatic missions to Vienna. But this project was also abandoned.

You can find out more about fitness equipment at this time in these items by the newspaper Standard and the radio broadcaster Deutschlandfunk.