I have the run of the place, set in the bank’s former boardroom, and have never cranked out a 5k under such an ornate ceiling. Serail House, one of the Rosewood’s magnificent suites, is named after the comic opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, which Mozart wrote here.Īfter a sneak peek of the dinner menu at 6.30pm on a Friday, I decide to pre-emptively burn off some calories in the decently equipped hotel gym. One place he certainly wouldn’t recognise is Milchgasse 1 - the collection of rooms where the composer lived for six months in 1781 and fell in love with Constanze, who became his wife, are long gone, but would have been on the site of the hotel. Heaven knows what Mozart would make today of the city he lived and worked in until his death in 1791. The overhauled Lower Belvedere gallery, dating from 1723, reopened in January. And two new museums have sprung up: the Heidi Horten Collection was unveiled in June in an old palace chancery the Albertina Modern in May 2020 at the Künstlerhaus, a refurbished gallery dating from the 1860s. Around the corner from Petersplatz, the boutique Leo Grand hotel opened in April in what was an 18th-century block of flats. Vienna has been named by The Economist as the world’s most liveable city, with the Rosewood opening coming amid a slew of new ventures. The hotel is flanked by charming Petersplatz, with its compact baroque church, as well as two streets, Tuchlauben and Milchgasse.

Inside, the 71 rooms and 28 suites are set around the neoclassical building’s courtyard, once the headquarters of the Erste Group Bank. The Rosewood’s façade, dating from 1835, has been restored and painted the colour of vanilla ice cream. It has, however, been worth holding out for. Yet when the Rosewood Vienna threw wide its doors on August 1 it marked the end of an eight-year wait for a new luxury hotel in the Austrian capital, the previous opening of a five-star property in the city being that of the Park Hyatt in the summer of 2014. The Viennese aren’t used to waiting: theirs is a city where the longest you’ll stand on a U-Bahn platform is five minutes, trams turn up on time and you rarely have to queue traffic - as Alex, my driver from the airport, jokes - is only “dreadful” when you’re caught behind one of the quaint horse-drawn carriages trundling through the Innere Stadt. Monday August 22 2022, 12.01am, The Times

Worth the Wait by Laura Jackson