Boutique and Luxury Hotels Vienna

Vienna is the capital that doesn't entirely belong to any one century. The Habsburg imperial scale of the Ringstrasse — opera house, Hofburg, Burgtheater, the great museums on the Maria-Theresien-Platz — sits alongside Otto Wagner's Secession architecture from 1900, Adolf Loos's clean modernist storefronts, and the post-war coffee houses where Thomas Bernhard and Friederike Mayröcker did their writing. The Wiener Kaffeehaus is a UNESCO-recognised institution: marble-topped tables, a single coffee ordered to occupy a chair for an afternoon, newspapers on wooden frames, the air of intellectual permission.

Most boutique travellers stay in the Neubau quarter — the seventh district, immediately behind the MuseumsQuartier, where the imperial city softens into the bohemian one. Concept stores and second-hand bookshops sit between the museums and the Naschmarkt; design studios have moved into the Biedermeier courtyards; the small bars and Beisl taverns of Spittelberg fill the cobbled lanes between Burggasse and Neustiftgasse. It is the part of Vienna where the city feels lived in rather than visited.

Hotel Motto sits on Mariahilfer Strasse at the southern edge of Neubau — a 1665 building reworked into a property that channels 1920s Parisian glamour through a Viennese sensibility. Blush velvets and burnished brass downstairs; Chez Bernard's rooftop bar at golden hour; the bakery on the ground floor that perfumes the whole entrance. Hotel Sans Souci sits at the opposite corner of the museum quarter, in the building that hosted the 1858 premiere of Strauss's Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka. Studio yoo's London-based design team reworked the interiors in 2010 — light, marble, contemporary chandeliers, a twenty-metre pool with crystal lights reflecting in the water.

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