Fairmont Golden Prague
- Aug 9
- 14 min read
Updated: Aug 10
A Hotel Reopened to the City
From Karel Filsak and René Roubíček to Marek Tichý, Martin Janecký and KODL Contemporary, a Prague landmark continues its story through architecture, art, glass and hospitality.
The first time I visited what is now the Fairmont Golden Prague, it was still difficult to imagine it as a hotel.
Opening was only weeks away, yet there was movement everywhere. Work was continuing across the building while Gerhard Struger, the hotel’s Managing Director, led me through rooms that were still somewhere between construction site and finished interior. It is a familiar moment in architecture: you know the plans, you have seen the renders, everyone assures you it will be ready — and still you wonder how this collection of surfaces, cables, objects and people can possibly become a place with a life of its own.
Then we reached the top.
Zlatá Praha was already taking shape as a restaurant. Chef Maroš Jambor and his team were testing in the kitchen; next door at Golden Eye, drinks were being fine-tuned behind the bar. And outside, the terrace opened almost all the way around us.
There was Prague.
Not the city of postcards so much as an almost improbable accumulation of towers, roofs, spires and distant silhouettes — the Prague one is always told exists, suddenly spread out in real space below.
Gerhard added stories. Some architectural, some about the old InterContinental, some involving the kinds of Cold War encounters and surveillance that inevitably gather around a hotel once designed to receive international guests behind the Iron Curtain.
It was the first moment I could imagine the building alive again.
I returned for the opening and have returned several times since. By now, it has become one of the places I seek out when I am in Prague — not least because the enthusiasm I encountered during that first unfinished visit did not disappear once the doors opened. Gerhard still seems able to tell the story behind almost every artwork, material and intervention. The team is approachable. Nothing feels overly guarded.
And then there was the taxi driver who, on the way there one evening, told me that he and his friends sometimes come to the hotel simply for a beer.
Architecture can declare itself open to the city. A masterplan can draw new public routes. A hotel can write accessibility into its concept.
A local deciding to drop in for a drink may be the more convincing measure.
view from Letná Zlatá Praha view from the rooftop terrace
view from Letná, Zlatá Praha & view from the rooftop terrace
A difficult building in a difficult place
Before it became the Fairmont Golden Prague, it was simply the InterContinental — and for many Praguers, it may remain so for some time.
Built between 1968 and 1974 under architect Karel Filsak, with Karel Bubeníček and Jaroslav Švec, the hotel arrived at an unusually charged moment. Conceived within the international ambitions of the late 1960s, it introduced the architecture and rituals of a global hotel into the political reality of communist Czechoslovakia.
The result was never simply an imported Western object.
Its architecture belonged to the broader language of post-war modernism and Brutalism, but its character was deeply tied to Czechoslovak art and applied design. Concrete, glass, timber, aluminium and ceramics were not merely construction materials; they formed part of an unusually integrated artistic programme.
The ceramic strips running vertically across the façade were designed by sculptor Zbyněk Sekal. Inside, works by Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová, René Roubíček, Čestmír Kafka, Miloslav Hejný, Josef Klimeš, Josef Jíra, František Ronovský, Hugo Demartini and others became inseparable from the building.
It was conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk long before the term returned to the vocabulary of contemporary hospitality.
Art did not decorate the hotel.
It constituted it.
The social history was equally layered. Foreign business travellers, politicians, performers and diplomats moved through a building that represented a rare point of international contact. At the same time, foreign visitors were observed by the Czechoslovak state security apparatus. Stories involving surveillance, political figures and more dubious international guests became part of the mythology of the place.
That contradiction remains useful when reading the architecture today.
The former InterContinental was both window and barrier. International and intensely local. A place for hospitality and a place of scrutiny. A monumental object inserted into one of Europe’s most delicate historic cityscapes.
Perhaps it is unsurprising that people still disagree about it. They should.
Architecture that is only agreeable tends to tell us very little.
wooden wall in the lobby by Josef Klimeš (1970) (restored by Jaroslav Bejvl) stained-glass windows at Kafka by Josef Jíra
wooden wall in the lobby by Josef Klimeš (1970), ballroom chandeliers by René Roubíček (restored by Jaroslav Bejvl), stained-glass windows at Kafka by Josef Jíra
Prague in concrete
The hotel belongs to a larger chapter of Prague that is easy to miss if one looks only for Gothic towers, Baroque façades and Art Nouveau interiors.
Follow the city’s post-war architecture instead and another Prague appears.
The former InterContinental sits on the Mapamátky Brutalist Route, alongside buildings that still provoke remarkably strong reactions. Some have survived, some have been altered beyond recognition, others disappeared altogether. Their reputation remains entangled with the political period in which they were built, even when their architects were working with ideas that reached far beyond state ideology.
The InterContinental occupies a particularly sensitive position within that landscape.
At the northern end of Pařížská, one of Prague’s grandest historic axes, it interrupts the expected rhythm of decorated façades with concrete mass, deep shadows and irregular ceramic surfaces. Behind it lies the Vltava.
It does not attempt to disappear into Old Town.
That tension is part of its value.
When the building’s new owners — Czech entrepreneurs Pavel Baudiš, Eduard Kučera and Oldřich Šlemr — chose restoration rather than replacement, the problem therefore went considerably beyond repairing an ageing hotel.
They were taking responsibility for an awkward piece of the city.
Fairmont Golden Prague Facade Fairmont Golden Prague Facade Fairmont Golden Prague
not the usual aesthetic
Restoring more than concrete
Architect Marek Tichý and his studio TaK Architects were selected to lead the transformation.
What followed was less a conventional refurbishment than a prolonged investigation into how post-war architecture can be repaired without becoming a replica of itself.
The building was in poor condition. Original construction deficiencies had been compounded by decades of alterations, particularly interventions made during the 1990s. Concrete required extensive diagnosis; parts of the envelope had reached the end of their technical life; individual artistic elements had disappeared, survived only in fragments or been moved away from their original context.
Some 15,000 individual interventions were eventually recorded during the concrete rehabilitation alone.
The façade presented another problem. Its 52 large vertical strips combined concrete, glass and Zbyněk Sekal’s distinctive ceramic pieces. Forty-eight eventually required replacement. Rather than smoothing out their irregularity, new pieces were produced to recreate variations in colour, width and texture.
Even imperfections mattered.
In the ballroom, a three-dimensional concrete ceiling originally designed by Jan Šrámek could not simply be retained. It had to be reconstructed structurally while preserving its original geometry and visual character. The series of 24 chandeliers by René Roubíček was restored by Bejvl Design Studio through a process involving surviving drawings, models, records and knowledge held by people connected to the original work.
These details reveal the more interesting dimension of Tichý’s work here.
He did not simply restore a Brutalist style.
He restored a way of working.
Architecture had originally been created alongside artists, glassmakers, sculptors, craftspeople and interior designers. The new project deliberately returned to that collaborative model, involving an unusually broad network of architects, engineers, artists, restorers, manufacturers and specialist workshops.
The question was no longer only: What should survive?
It became: How can another generation enter the conversation without pretending to belong to the first?
The Gesamtkunstwerk continues
Walking through the building today means continually moving between periods.
There is František Ronovský’s large encaustic painting in the lobby. Restored glass by Libenský and Brychtová. Monumental carved timber by Josef Klimeš. Sections of Miloslav Hejný’s Enchanted Forest. Josef Jíra’s stained-glass windows. Čestmír Kafka’s ceiling works. And upstairs in Zlatá Praha, Hugo Demartini’s gilded fixtures return to the room for which they were conceived.
They are not gathered into a heritage corner.
Contemporary work exists immediately beside them.
Zdeněk Lhotský’s glass interventions move between architecture and artwork. Jan Černohorský developed mirrored glass bricks for the reception. Jan Kukla’s Heavens introduces hundreds of illuminated glass rods around the entrance, carrying the artistic programme outward onto the façade.
This matters because the new art has not been commissioned to create the atmosphere of the 1970s. It speaks from now.
The continuity lies in the role given to art, not in stylistic imitation.
That distinction is perhaps clearest in the work of Martin Janecký.
glass ‘tapestries’ by Zdeněk Lhotský glass castings by Jan Černohorský light installation "Heaven" by Jan Kukla
glass "tapestries" by Zdeněk Lhotský, glass castings by Jan Černohrský, light installation "Heaven" by Jan Kukla
Prague, rewritten in glass
Janecký’s monumental House Signs of Prague in the lobby began with a conversation with Marek Tichý. The idea connected several histories at once. Motifs of house signs had already appeared within the original hotel architecture. Janecký’s own studio is in Malá Strana, where historical house signs still punctuate façades in the neighbourhood around him. And his practice carries another geography altogether: he grew up within the glassmaking culture of northern Bohemia, learning the craft in factories before developing the highly sculptural blown-glass practice for which he is known.
For Fairmont, familiar symbols from Prague’s architectural memory were transformed into opaline glass.
Janecký describes them not as decorative accents but as quiet narrative layers — objects that bring a more intimate, vulnerable scale into dialogue with the building’s strong geometry.
It is a particularly successful example of what happens throughout the hotel.
Local identity is rarely introduced through quotation.
Instead, it is translated.
Glass without nostalgia
That translation continues almost everywhere one looks.
At CooCoo’s Nest, Kateřina Handlová’s installation for Czech glassmaker BOMMA takes its cue from Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. A constellation of hand-blown crystal forms turns the language of pills and capsules into something simultaneously playful and uneasy.
The film reference is legible, but the result is not film memorabilia.
It is another thread between contemporary design, Czech cultural history and the place outside: Miloš Forman Square.
Elsewhere, BROKIS works at a quieter scale.
The smoke-grey glass and walnut of Muffins, designed by Lucie Koldová and Dan Yeffet, adds warmth to the lobby; versions appear again in the Gold Lounge. Capsula by Koldová brings transparent and opaline glass to the Presidential Suite. Upstairs at Zlatá Praha, Senza Fine is produced from recycled BROKISGLASS in warm cognac tones, allowing a material developed from production shards to sit beside restored twentieth-century works.
Preciosa contributes another line through the building, while Lasvit moves from detail to architecture.
In 250 rooms and suites, handcrafted glass wall panels interpret the texture of the ceramic façade rather than reproducing it literally. Below ground, the relationship changes scale dramatically. At the spa reception, a collaboration between Wanda Valihrachová, Lasvit and TaK Architects becomes a 17-ton glass landscape made from around 2,500 individually worked lamellas, its fractured surfaces suggesting the movement of water.
I encountered that work from both sides of the finished object.
After meeting Kateřina Handlová around the opening of the hotel, I later visited Lasvit and had the chance to enter Wanda Valihrachová’s thought process more closely: the long route between first idea, testing, technical detours, failures, decisions and finally something that appears completely inevitable once installed.
That distance between effort and apparent ease is one of the things I increasingly look for in places. The best work often hides how difficult it was to achieve.
handcrafted glass wall panels by Lasvit hand-blown crystal forms by Bomma the glass wall at the spa is a collaboration between Wanda Valihrachová, Lasvit and TaK Architects
handcrafted glass wall panels by Lasvit, hand-blown crystal forms by Bomma, glass wall at the spa reception by Lasvit
Knowing the faces changes the place
Why does it matter who made a lamp, restored a chandelier or worked out how a piece of glass could weigh seventeen tonnes without becoming merely monumental?
Because knowing changes perception.
A room can be visually impressive without context. But once you know that someone spent months reconstructing the logic of a damaged concrete ceiling, that a glassmaker adapted a motif encountered every day on the streets of Malá Strana, or that a designer moved through countless prototypes before an installation found its final form, the room becomes something else.
One begins to see labour.
Decisions.
Negotiation.
Risk.
Care.
And, ideally, a little obsession.
This is also why the Fairmont rarely feels to me like a showroom for Czech design, despite the density of recognisable names. The objects are too integrated for that. There are no exhibition ropes around the art. No atmosphere of walking through a precious collection under supervision. Furniture is sat on. Glass is encountered at hand level. The historic works remain embedded in spaces that are being eaten in, crossed, cleaned, rearranged and lived with.
Art and design retain their value without being separated from use. That was true of the original hotel. It may be one of the most important continuities of the new one.
The people who chose to continue it
Such a project does not happen through architectural sensitivity alone. The investment required to preserve, reconstruct and commission at this level was substantial. The three Czech entrepreneurs who acquired the building chose a considerably more complicated path than replacing its difficult inheritance with a cleaner luxury narrative.
One can read financial logic into any hotel project.
Here, it is harder to ignore something else.
A degree of affection.
For the building, certainly, but also for what it represented: Czech architecture, applied art, glassmaking and a certain idea of the grand city hotel as a social place.
Marek Tichý could propose the architectural continuity. Artists could extend it. Fairmont could provide the operating framework.
But somebody first had to decide that the difficult thing was worth keeping.
A host who knows the stories
And then a building has to become hospitality. This is where Gerhard Struger matters. There are general managers who operate hotels and there are hosts who appear genuinely fascinated by the place they have been given. Gerhard belongs to the second category.
On every visit I have been struck by how much of the building’s history he has absorbed. Not only the obvious milestones but the works, anecdotes and people behind them. His enthusiasm could easily become theatrical in another context; here it works because it is matched by curiosity.
The same applies to the wider team.
I have been back often enough for the first-event choreography to wear off. The atmosphere has remained warm and informal. Questions are usually met with answers rather than suspicion. Looking closely at an artwork does not bring a security guard running.
That may sound insignificant.
In a luxury hotel filled with valuable art, it is not.
The aspiration was always to make this a place for Prague as well as for hotel guests.
On repeated visits, I have begun to believe them.
The beer test
The taxi-driver story stays with me for exactly that reason. It is easy to design a public lobby.
It is much harder to make people feel that they may actually use it.
In a hotel of this scale and category, a Prague resident choosing to come in for a beer is a small act of appropriation. The city has begun to use the building on its own terms.
CooCoo’s Nest helps. So do restaurants and bars that can be entered without passing through the psychological threshold of “hotel guest only”. The garden and routes towards the river further loosen the distinction between private hospitality and urban space.
Whether locals will eventually stop calling it the InterContinental is another question.
Perhaps names take longer to renovate than buildings.
I will keep listening.
Green House at Fairmont Golden Prague Aperitivo at Fairmont Golden Prague Zlatá Praha at Fairmont Golden Prague
from a local beer to aperitivo or fine dining –– Fairmont Golden Prague connects with the city
From the hotel into the city
Marek Tichý’s work was never limited to the existing structure. The larger Staroměstská brána — Old Town Gate project asks what happens around it. The former InterContinental had created broken urban relationships: ramps, service infrastructure and inaccessible edges interrupted the route from Pařížská towards the river. TaK’s broader strategy therefore extends architecture into landscape, new pedestrian connections, greenery, gastronomy, art spaces and the embankment.
The hotel is only one piece.
This is an important distinction.
A building may be restored beautifully and still remain an island.
The more ambitious question is whether its reconstruction can repair part of the city around it.
Art crosses the street
One answer now sits only a few steps away.
KODL Contemporary, designed by TaK Architects as a transparent pavilion near the end of Pařížská, takes the art conversation beyond the hotel.
The gallery is independent, but the proximity creates connections that are difficult to ignore.
Artists encountered inside Fairmont recur next door. Martin Janecký, for instance, whose opaline house signs inhabit the lobby, presented Dreamer at KODL Contemporary in 2025. His work therefore creates a literal thread from hotel to gallery — and from hospitality into Prague’s contemporary art scene.
That is precisely the kind of connection that makes an urban place interesting.
Not everything needs to belong to the same institution.
Sometimes adjacency is more productive.
The glass pavilion and the heavy concrete hotel could hardly be more different in expression, yet both belong to Tichý’s attempt to rethink this end of Pařížská as something other than a terminus.
One leads into the other.
And both lead towards the river.
KODL Contemporary sculpture by Martin Janecký painting by Jiří Straka
KODL Contemporary with art pieces by Martin Janecký and Jiří Straka
The square is still becoming
The story is not finished. Miloš Forman Square in front of the hotel remains the next major piece. Following an international competition, Danish studio ADEPT was selected in 2026 with RaumScape, a landscape-based proposal that draws on the spatial thinking of Adolf Loos and translates it into a public ground of different layers: paving, trees, open areas for cultural and everyday use, water and a low circular pavilion intended as another place of gathering.
The reference to Forman is already woven throughout the existing project — in the square’s name, in CooCoo’s Nest, in film posters and in the investors’ engagement with Czech film.
The future square could finally give those cultural references an urban room of their own.
And perhaps that is the most fitting continuation of the former InterContinental.
Not another interior.
A piece of city.
Still InterContinental?
There is something appealing about the fact that the Fairmont Golden Prague remains unresolved. The hotel itself is open. Zlatá Praha is cooking. Glass catches the light. People drink beneath objects that would be perfectly at home in a gallery. The concrete carries traces of decisions made fifty years ago and thousands of repairs made only recently.
Yet outside, another chapter is still being drawn.
Perhaps that is why I keep returning.
The building does not feel preserved in a finished state. It feels continued.
Some things have been meticulously restored. Others have been reinterpreted. New work sits beside old without pretending there is no difference between them. Artists reappear across the street. A hotel bar sends you towards a filmmaker. A glass wall towards northern Bohemia. A chandelier towards a workshop. A façade towards the politics of post-war Prague.
And a taxi driver may simply send you inside for a beer.
Places become richer when their threads remain visible.
Fairmont Golden Prague has many of them.
The city has not finished pulling at them yet.
The Fairmont Golden Prague Cosmos
Original architecture_Karel Filsak, Karel Bubeníček and Jaroslav Švec
Architecture and restoration_Marek Tichý / TaK Architects, with Klára Tichá, Alžběta Komorná, Fiona Thompson, Kate Cunningham and the wider project team
Investors and initiators_Pavel Baudiš, Eduard Kučera and Oldřich Šlemr
Host_Gerhard Struger / Fairmont Golden Prague
Interior design and FF&E_Richmond International
Art direction and architectural integration_Marek Tichý / TaK Architects
Art and typography_Studio Najbrt
Signage and wayfinding_Corlette Design
Historic art and craft_Zbyněk Sekal, René Roubíček, Čestmír Kafka, Miloslav Hejný, Hugo Demartini, Stanislav Libenský & Jaroslava Brychtová, Josef Jíra, František Ronovský, Josef Klimeš
Restoration_Bejvl Design Studio, ART Atelier Fiala, Ateliér VITRAJ, Cihelna Kadaň
Contemporary art_Martin Janecký, Zdeněk Lhotský, Jan Kukla / LIGHT ME UP, Jan Černohorský / Ateliér VITRAJ, Wanda Valihrachová
Czech glass and lighting_Lasvit, BOMMA, BROKIS, Preciosa
Selected designers_Kateřina Handlová, Lucie Koldová, Dan Yeffet
Zlatá Praha kitchen_Maroš Jambor and team
F&B concept_Gorgeous Group
Landscape and blue-green infrastructure_JENA, Treewalker
Lighting consultancy_ERCO, U1 Lighting
Photography_BoysPlayNice / Linda Pezzei
Art next door_KODL Contemporary / Jakub Kodl
Public realm_Staroměstská brána / TaK Architects
Next urban chapter_RaumScape / ADEPT, Miloš Forman Square
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Further Threads
This story is only one reading of Fairmont Golden Prague. Many of its threads deserve stories of their own.
Marek Tichý / TaK Architects — Restoration not as stylistic recovery, but as a method for extending post-war architecture into another generation.
Prague Brutalist Route / Mapamátky — Follow the former InterContinental into Prague’s less obvious architectural history, from Kotva to the city’s late-modern infrastructure.
Martin Janecký — From northern Bohemian glass culture and a hot shop in Malá Strana to House Signs of Prague and KODL Contemporary.
Kateřina Handlová / BOMMA — Contemporary Czech glass moving between collectible design, cultural reference and architectural installation.
Wanda Valihrachová / Lasvit — What happens between a sketch and 17 tonnes of glass: site-specific work as material research.
BROKIS / Lucie Koldová — Bohemian glass between industrial continuity, contemporary lighting and recycled material experimentation.
René Roubíček / Bejvl Design Studio — How do you restore a complex glass work when the original artist is no longer there to explain it?
KODL Contemporary — A new transparent art space at the edge of Pařížská and a link between Prague artists and a wider international scene.
Miloš Forman / Czech film — From CooCoo’s Nest to the square outside: another cultural history running through the project.
ADEPT / RaumScape — The next chapter: turning the unfinished space in front of the hotel into part of Prague’s public life.
