Hotel Central & Hybernská Street
Why is it significant?
Walk along Hybernská until you spot a facade where gilded branches and leaves seem to grow out of the wall, spreading over the gable and around the name of the hotel. Among the grey neighbours it looks almost like a Viennese cake shop window.
Key Facts
| Place | Hotel Central & Hybernská Street |
|---|---|
| Address | Hybernská 1001/10, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08680, 14.43090 |
| Part of Walk | Gilded Leaves and Crystal Facades: Prague's Art Nouveau & Cubist Walk |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk along Hybernská until you spot a facade where gilded branches and leaves seem to grow out of the wall, spreading over the gable and around the name of the hotel. Among the grey neighbours it looks almost like a Viennese cake shop window.
This is the former Hotel Central, finished around 1901 and counted among the very first Art Nouveau buildings in Prague. It was designed by Friedrich Ohmann, a Viennese professor teaching at the Prague school of applied arts, together with two of his students, Alois Dryák and Bedřich Bendelmayer. Those two students then went on to build the Hotel Evropa on Wenceslas Square, the most photographed Art Nouveau hotel in the city. So in a sense, this is the sketch, and Evropa is the masterpiece.
Art Nouveau arrived late in Prague, around 1900, but it spread like wildfire. Within a decade the city had a new station, new hotels, new insurance palaces and a whole new boulevard, all wrapped in plants, women and gold. Hybernská shows the moment the style first stepped onto the street.
The street has more stories than its quiet look suggests. Its name comes from the Hibernians, Irish Franciscans who had a monastery at the far end in the seventeenth century. And across the road stands the People's House, the old headquarters of the Social Democrats, where in January 1912 a conference of Russian revolutionaries was held, dominated by Lenin. For decades afterwards, the communist regime ran a Lenin museum there.
The hotel itself has changed hands and functions over the century, and the facade has outlived all of them. Continue to the end of Hybernská and pass the Powder Tower and the Municipal House on your right, Prague's grandest Art Nouveau building, which deserves its own visit. Then walk into Celetná, the old royal route, and stop at the corner of Ovocný trh, by a house with a black statue of the Virgin in a golden cage.