Why live like a King when you can live like an Emperor? We flew to the Austrian capital, Vienna, to spend a night being treated like Royalty at Schönbrunn Palace, the fairytale former home of Emperor Franz Joseph.
The Butler did it. Silver salver in hand, immaculate in a tailcoat, and etiquette incarnate, he was the proof we needed that we weren’t dreaming. Yes, we were actually living in a palace. The Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, to be precise. The former residence of Emperor Franz Joseph.
And while millions of people can say they’ve been there and have the postcards to prove it, very, very few of them will have had the privilege of spending the night there in the sort of splendour that is only usually available to Presidents, potentates and blue-blooded Royalty.
As someone who was married at The Ritz and honeymooned at the Hermitage in Monaco, I’m not entirely unaccustomed to opulence.
But spending a night in a palace was a first. And although being treated like Royalty wasn’t (they’re very good at that at The Ritz, you know), being treated like Royalty in a place where Royalty used to be treated certainly was.
I can see why the Emperor liked it so much. Grander, larger and with almost twice as many rooms as Bucking-ham Palace (the one that the Queen of England has to make do with), Schönbrunn Palace is not only a World Heritage Site but the most dazzling jewel in Vienna’s imperial crown.
Perhaps, like us, the Emperor arrived at Schönbrunn Palace by horse-drawn carriage and decided, as we did, to go for a trot around the grounds first.
Even glimpsed over the rear end of a horse, Schönbrunn Palace is a vision to behold.
Stretching so far in each direction that you can’t take it all in without swivelling your head like a spectator at Wimbledon’s Centre Court, it was clearly intended to impress Franz Joseph’s friends (if he had any) and to demoralise his enemies (which it almost certainly did).
I don’t know what the German for “Wow!” is, but it was probably coined right here in front of Schönbrunn Palace. Set on 500 acres, the home of the Habsburgs is a Baroque masterpiece whose red and yellow palette is as familiar to Austrians as the Eiffel Tower is to the French, and the clock tower of Big Ben is to the English.
The vast courtyard is heaving with tourists as we arrive, their chatter accompanied by the ‘clip-clip’ of hooves on cobbles from the horse-drawn carriages, but we are met by a charming young woman in uniform and whisked past the queues of visitors towards an anonymous-looking door that leads into the parts of the palace that the tourists never get to see.
We puff our way up numerous flights of stairs to find our suitcases have miraculously arrived before us.
A gold-tasselled key ring is produced with a flourish, the huge wooden door opens, and we get our first glimpse of what living in a palace is like.
We enter a red and white panelled corridor with parquet flooring, wowing all the way as we open door after door to discover one delight after another. There are two bedrooms – one with a dreamy four-poster – plus a dressing room, two bathrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, and a sitting room.
Everywhere we look lies opulence, from the pineapple damask panelling and soft furnishings to the gilded headboards, mirrors and writing desks. It’s only when we stand at one of the many windows that we realise why people are prepared to pay quite so handsomely for the pleasure of staying in a palace rather than merely visiting it as a tourist.
Gaze down at the courtyard, and you see Lilliputians milling among the formal flower beds and the statuary, while way up on the hill stands the Gloriette, a magnificent structure that the previous occupants of our suite used as a breakfast room from which to look down on their subjects and the city.
Having been one of the millers around at many a palace, I can assure you that being inside a palace looking out is infinitely better than the other way around. And I suspect that staying in one for too long could easily bring on a bout of imperiousness, with even our vocabulary beginning to become more old-fashioned as the evening progressed.
Instead of merely going to bed, we retired for the night, and snacks gave way to tiffin. With our teenaged daughter decanted to her own gilded bedroom down the corridor, my wife and I were able to relax in our four-poster and have an uninterrupted view of the floodlit Gloriette as darkness fell.
It disappeared at 10 pm when the lights went out (not sure what the Emperor would have thought of that), but the memory of the view is something that will stay with us forever. Emperors, I suppose, may eventually suffer from palace fatigue, but we were in no danger of that.
Living in a palace trumps even the grandest of grand hotels anywhere in the world in no danger of that. We loved every moment of the experience and were surprised (though perhaps we shouldn’t have been) to wander into the kitchen in the morning and find a chef in his whites preparing our breakfast with his assistant. No idea how he got in there, but that’s palaces for you, I suppose.
It was a glorious breakfast, too, and more than sufficient to have kept even a monarch the size of Henry VIII going until at least Elevenses.
The chef turned out to be the Head Chef of the nearby Parkhotel Schönbrunn, now a four-star hotel but once used by the Emperor to house his VIP guests, presumably when the 1,441 rooms in his palace across the road proved insufficient.
Our chef had been accustomed to working in five-star hotels, which was evident, and was part of a small, elite team dedicated to looking after us and anyone else fortunate enough to be able to stay in the palace.
An estate agent might describe the Grand Suite of Schönbrunn Palace as a vast, double-aspect penthouse with unrivalled views across the immaculate grounds towards the Gloriette in one direction and the city in another, but its selling point would always be location, location, location.
Living in a palace trumps even the grandest of grand hotels anywhere in the world and is an experience that usually can’t be bought. The cost, though, is something of a shock.
The Imperial Suite package, which gives you all the extras, including the butler, use of a limousine in Vienna, a horse-drawn carriage ride around the grounds, and a private tour of the palace, costs about £4,200 a night.
When you consider that some very discerning people pay £25,000 for a single night in the best suite at the prestigious Rosewood London and keep going back because they believe it to be worth every penny, that makes a stay in the Grand Suite at Schönbrunn Palace the bargain of the century in the world of luxury travel.
Five nights in a palace for the same cost as one night in an elite hotel is so unbelievable that I advised the Vienna Tourist Board to put the price up dramatically in case its relative affordability had the Emperor turning in his grave.
So you can blame me, unless you’re quick enough and shrewd enough to go to the austria-trend.at the website and book it before the price soars to a level more befitting of the luxury on offer.
Not wishing to miss even a moment of our own palace time, we postponed our private tour of the palace until we’d checked out.
The palace was heaving with visitors, but our guide, Michael Felkel-Zisser, transformed what could have been a dull “this happened then, and that happened there” tour into a fascinating trip through the palace’s colourful history, bringing the people who inhabited it before us to three-dimensional life.
His descriptions and insights were so compelling that he had to stop frequently and remind people politely that ours was a private tour.
If I were ever fortunate enough to stay in the palace again, I’d insist on having Michael as my tour guide – and I’d pay whatever extra it cost to have that tour at night when all the other visitors had gone home. It, and Michael, would be worth every penny.
I wouldn’t have dared suggest this if I had been a guest of the Emperor, but there is one tweak that would make a stay at the palace even better.
The four-poster in the Grand Suite is fine, so far as it goes, but as someone who’s been sleeping for a quarter of a century in a solid cherrywood French four-poster from Simon Horn, I feel qualified to offer a suggestion.
The canopy of the Schönbrunn four-poster is an empty frame, open to the ceiling, whereas mine at home has what is best described as a Starry Night panel in the canopy, which makes you feel as if you’re sleeping under a romantic night sky.
Mine came from Starscape, and it would elevate the palace’s four-poster from so-so to being out of this world – though it must be said that there can’t be a four-poster on the planet with a view quite so magnificent.
If you do stay at Schönbrunn Palace long enough to want to venture outside the palace gates, Vienna is your oyster.
As one of the world’s most elegant capital cities, it lives to the beat of Mozart and Strauss, it’s renowned for its coffee and café culture, and it is, of course, the birthplace of the waltz.
This is why my wife and I found ourselves not exactly waltzing into the famed Tanschule Elmayer, as we didn’t at that point know-how, but certainly entering its hallowed portals with a spring in our step.
We’d come for a private, one-to-one (or, rather, one-to-two) waltz lesson in the city where it all started and were met at the entrance by Professor Thomas Schafer-Elmayer, one of the most debonair fellows you could wish to meet, which makes it no surprise that he also runs classes on etiquette.
As a surprise for a loved one, an hour at the Professor’s prestigious dance school
(see elmayer.at) is great fun – though if you’re staying at the Schönbrunn Palace you might want to have the waltz lesson at the Elmayer first so you can swish about your apartment in style.
And if, like us, you need some help to adjust to life outside the Palace gates again, you could try a walking tour of this beautiful city with a private tour guide as knowledgeable as Gabriela Steiner-Scharfetter of Wienkultours (see wienkultours.at).
Avoiding the traditional tourist magnets, she showed us the quieter parts of the city that most people miss out on because they don’t know they’re there.
Although we didn’t get a chance to stay there this time, we were wowed as we walked through the ground floor of the magnificent, stately Hotel Sacher in central Vienna, where my wife had a spa session called Time To Chocolate.
I didn’t witness it, preferring to eat chocolate outside the treatment room, but my wife described it afterwards as feeling as if she’d been touched by the hands of a hundred angels.
But what surprised me even more than the Sacher therapist’s ability to make her two hands seem like 50 times as many was the discovery that no one we met in Vienna had any idea that people could pay to stay at the Palace.
Jaws dropped, eyebrows were raised, and curiosity was aroused whenever we mentioned it – and, unaccustomed as we were to stay in palaces, we did tend to mention it to anyone who’d listen!
Feeling for all the world like a monarch deposed, I’ve devised a coping strategy: I’m living out the plot of Roman Holiday, pretending I’ve slipped outside the Palace walls “just for a bit”
For more information, visit: austria-trend.at/en/hotels/schloss-schonbrunn-suite
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