The house
Built in 1903 for people who came to drink the water
Five bays, a mansard roof and a ballroom on the first floor, which the rest of the building was planned around.
Between 1890 and 1910 Karlovy Vary filled up with houses like this one, with rooms upstairs, a public room below and the left bank within walking distance of the springs.
This one has kept its plan almost exactly: reception is where it always was and the ballroom is still a ballroom. The garden level, which held the boiler and the laundry, now has the spa and, at the far end, the gaming room.
Rooms
Twenty-nine
Built
1903
Colonnade
Four minutes upstream
Reception
7:00 to 23:00
Four kinds of room on four different levels
34 m² · king · river front
Salonový pokoj
First floor, river front, with the three tall windows that match the ballroom windows directly below them.
29 m² · king or twin · garden side
Zahradní pokoj
Garden side, second floor, with the window wall that was put in when the roof was rebuilt in 1974 and is the one unapologetically modern thing in the building.
26 m² · twin · garden level
Lázenský pokoj
Four rooms on the garden level, next to the spa, each with the deep timber bathroom that the 1903 builder put in and nobody has had the nerve to replace.
The ballroom
First floor, and still the best room in the building
Twelve round tables, or a hundred and sixty standing, under the original coffered ceiling.
It was built for the season: concerts in the afternoon, dancing in the evening, and a card room off the anteroom that stopped being a card room in 1948 and became a store.
The ceiling is the original plaster and the chandelier is the second one, the first having come down in 1931 without, according to the house book, injuring anybody.
The gaming room
The casino is on the garden level, below the ballroom
Nine tables and a bar, open five evenings a week, all of it inside this house on Zahradní.
Take the anteroom stair down from the first floor, or go straight down from reception, and the door at the end of the garden-level corridor is the one you want. It is forty-five paces from the desk.
Czech law sets the age at 18, and a document is checked at the door on every visit. Before you sit down, staff will agree a limit with you.
Where this is
Left bank, four minutes below the mill colonnade
Zahradní follows the Teplá on the left bank. Upstream are the colonnades and the hot spring; downstream is the theatre and the bridge across to the funicular.
Prague is two hours by road. The nearest airport with scheduled flights is Karlovy Vary, twelve minutes away, though most guests arrive from Prague.