Altstadt Vienna

A bearded, urban mountaineer is talking excitedly at Mr Smith in the airport gents. It wasn’t a long flight to Vienna, but the rugged Austrian is drinking copiously from the tap as if he has just trekked here from Innsbruck. Mr Smith (also dressed in unnecessarily hardy outdoor wear) explains that he can’t speak German. 'Ah…’ the lumber-sexual smiles, gesticulating to the tap, ‘Austrian tap water – the best in the world!’

Sure enough, when we open the door to our suite in Hotel Altstadt 45 minutes later, what should be sitting on the exquisite marble-and-teak occasional table but a decanter and two gold-rimmed glasses, alongside a printed exhortation from the management to: ‘Fill up your source of life.’ ‘We love tap,’ it says. ‘Drink Viennese water and enjoy the energy of the Alpine springs.’ (Was this what the novelist Stefan Zweig meant when he said that the city had ‘sperm in the air’?) Shoving Mr Smith and any unaesthetic travelling debris into the cupboard in our exuberantly wallpapered entrance hall, I drape myself onto the cream chaise longue with a glass of this elixir.

Named after the Jewish-Austrian architect and designer who fled Vienna in the 1930s, the Josef Frank suite is the latest addition to Hotel Altstadt. Created in 2016 by Svenskt Tenn – the Stockholm design firm Frank helped make so iconic – it showcases the colourful style of the father of Swedish modernism. Mid-century furniture and modernist lamps clad in Frank’s wildly florid textiles are wittily juxtaposed with the grand ceilings and high windows of this turn-of-the-century town house, originally an Austro-Hungarian industrialist’s palais.

Mr Smith creeps out of the cupboard to find me Googling Svenskt Tenn lampshades – dangerously, you can buy most of our suite on their website – and whisks me out for pre-opera apéritifs. Shortly, we are crammed into the epicurean warmth of what is best described as a cheese, ham and wine womb talking to a middle-aged couple about Brexit. They’re astonished to find two Brits sardined amid the handful of locals catching up over cured meat. But thanks to Hotel Altstadt’s insider guide, here we are in Urbanek, a tiny speciality stall in the Naschmarkt, enjoying truly echt ‘Wiener Schmäh' (Viennese banter).

Walking home through the city’s formidable architecture, we feel we’re in Vienna a hundred years before. And, as we climb up Hotel Altstadt’s grand staircase to bed, we feel more like residents than tourists. This likely has less to do with the ghosts of old Wien, than with owner Otto E. Wiesenthal’s commitment to ‘the art of hospitality’. A travel-weary former businessman, he wanted to create a sense of home from home in his hotel, and it does exactly that: throughout our stay I am oblivious to any other guests and float across its parquet floors with patrician propriety.

Waking up the next morning from the kind of sleep you dream of, I pad across a mock animal-hide rug (Frank’s playful finger-up to game hunters) to the retro coffee machine to pour the grunting Mr Smith an espresso. I draw the curtains and, as if by magic, the whole city is covered in snow. Coming to Vienna in late December at the height of advent, we had anticipated the glitter and glühwein of Christkindlmarkts, but this feels like we've won the yuletide jackpot. We rush to breakfast as giddy as children on Christmas morning.

Breakfast doesn’t disappoint. Served in a series of grand rooms decorated in Altstadt style – Ringstrasse Vienna with a modern and playful sensibility – it is a smorgasbord worthy of the name. It’s not that there’s an excessive spread, it’s that everything is just right: granola that likely came from an Alpine health farm; superior stollen that wonderfully has not. We plump for a table by the 10-foot Christmas tree, our festive-season harangued immune systems revived by an organic vitamin-juice shot before we order the day’s eggs.

Finally managing to step full-bellied into the frozen air, we stomp through five minutes of snow to the Museumsquartier, occasionally nipping into the shops of Boboville, Hotel Altstadt’s arty environs. After a day imagining ourselves in the world of Klimt, Schiele, Wittgenstein and Schoenberg, we slip into Freud’s favourite hangout to analyse our plans. We realise it’s the 19th December and most restaurants are fully booked. Mr Smith has dangerously low blood-sugar levels, so I order him one of Café Landtmann’s famous Mozart cakes and ring the hotel. Five minutes later, they confirm our reservation.

And so, we find ourselves sitting amid the Doric columns of Emperor Francis Joseph I’s private coach entrance to the 19th-century Burgtheater. This is Vestibül: Christian Domschitz’s modern-Viennese restaurant. And thanks to the hotel’s superior staff, we’re sat in its historic marbled interior, pairing the exquisite tasting menu with Austrian wines.

Just as we’re planning to move to Vienna while we’re still in the EU, somehow it’s nearly time to leave. After a walk through the mist to The Third Man’s iconic Ferris wheel, we enjoy our last moments by the hotel’s fireplace, eating home-made cake. We may not speak fluent German, but we’ve picked up one word describing Vienna’s satiated, cosy pleasure. Forget hygge, it’s all about gemütlichkeit. And Hotel Altstadt has it in strudels.