Tablet10: The Augustine

The latest issue of our Tablet10 magazine is here. Each week we’ll be spotlighting a different hotel from Volume 9. Last week, we took your breath away with Amanagiri — always a danger, especially at high elevation in the desert of the American West.

This week we turn our attention to The Augustine in Prague — a former monastery and now a world-class Rocco Forte hotel.

In the years immediately following the fall of Communism, Prague was among the first of the former Iron Curtain capitals to open itself to mass Western tourism — and in the following decades, it’s become commonplace for travel editors in search of an angle to refer to just about any town in Eastern or Central Europe as “the new Prague.”

It’s a harmless enough cliché. But one mustn’t let the search for the new Prague become a distraction from the old Prague. The Czech capital caught on for a number of reasons, and chief among them is its picturesque history, reflected in any number of ancient buildings in the Staré Město, the scenic old quarter. A prime example is this old Augustinian monastery, which has found new, luxurious life as The Augustine.

We spoke with Olga Polizzi, Rocco Forte’s Director of Design — and a hotelier herself — to get the scoop on the process of converting a house of God to a more worldly purpose.

Tablet: When it comes time to design a new hotel, such as the Augustine, does it begin with a concept, or a reaction to the site?

Olga Polizzi: Well, because I’m also a hotelier, as well as a designer, I’m involved right from the beginning in the space planning, the layouts, everything to do with the footprint of the hotel. The restaurants, how many, what sort of restaurants they are. So we have to get that right. The spaces, the size of the rooms and bathrooms, the air conditioning and how we’re going to hide it. So everything to do with the hotel. Even if there are outside designers working on it, they might give us an initial plan, and then we look at it, and we critique it, and we change it as necessary.

My brother, Rocco Forte, he has very strong ideas of how large he wants the rooms, what he wants the hotel to look like, and we follow that.

The historic building must have guided you a bit. What was the vision or the concept for the Augustine?

I saw it right at the beginning, when it was just a wreck, really, and they were monks’ cells. We had to do it gently and carefully, and yet still make a very comfortable hotel out of it. And the Czech English Heritage is very tough, as they’re quite right to be, and they have their own rules that we have to follow.

We had to raise the roof to make more rooms, because we didn’t want less than a hundred rooms. So we raised the roof on the top floor. We left a lot of exposed beams. There certainly wasn’t a bathroom per room, and the cells were quite small, so we had two or three monks’ cells per room, and had to try and fit the bathrooms in without ruining the shape of the room. It had a lot of constraints, and quite a lot of difficulties, but it’s made for a very charming hotel.

Your style is classic, and somewhat at odds with the prevailing idea of modern hotel design.

I like very contemporary design, but it has to be sort of fit to purpose, and it has to be really comfortable. It’s pointless having a hotel that doesn’t have comfort. When you say classical, I don’t know — I suppose, yes. I don’t do a lot of sort of pastiche anymore. I did in my time. When the frills and flounces were in, I did more than my fair share of frills and flounces. But now, no, I rather like a sort of simple look.

There’s more where this came from. For more of the year’s best hotels, and for more from Olga Polizzi, send for a copy of the new Tablet10 magazine.

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