Seventeen stories hidden in the hotel

We wanted our design to live up to our guests’ anticipation of a special experience at the front desk. No matter how we arrived at the image: the one at the front desk is a coin-sized section of the skin of a young brown trout, which a fly fisherman gently drew from the Kamp River and, after it was photographed, carefully released again right away.

Depending on the weather and on how warm or cool you like it, there is a small but fine covered sidewalk terrace on the street side and a spacious courtyard garden on the courtyard side. The way there leads across a very special crosswalk: the “zebra crosswalk” in front of the hotel’s main entrance is a barcode that, when scanned with a smartphone, spells out the letter “Z.”

Right in plain sight, and yet easy to overlook. Time may pass, but one element keeps turning up for attentive guests at Zeitgeist Vienna, whether on glass surfaces, on the bumper of the bocce court in the courtyard or on the room key card: the pergola. It is the wooden structure that greets guests overhead as they enter the hotel, separates the bar from the front desk and steers your steps toward the courtyard garden. Our restaurant, café & bar Pergola owes its name to this structure, and Zeitgeist Vienna owes it its logo.

Everyone associates a tent with memories of youth, or with vacations from the days when a night in a hotel was still out of reach. And yet everyone agrees: “We still had a great time back then.” The tent links those memories to the situation you are actually in. There are two main reasons why the tent was put up on the back office: as a concept, a tent and a hotel go together beautifully. And the space was there. In the evening, you can make out the outline of the Zeitgeist in the tent, which likes to sleep there.

ZEITGEIST: a word that originates in the Enlightenment, the epoch that did so much to point the way for humankind’s intellectual development. Once you choose a name with a historical reference, you have to be aware of where it comes from and what it means. So we asked the author Hanno Millesi to write a text on the ideas of Zeitgeist and hotel. The visual artist Martin Kitzler created the conceptual frame for the essay: 254 rooms, 1 mirror in each room, 6 words per mirror add up to 1,524 words. To read the full text, you can visit all 254 of our rooms, or look it up on the back wall behind the front desk.

Ready-made typefaces, the kind anyone can use, struck us as too anonymous for the most intimate areas of a hotel, the rooms where guests retreat. So the visual artist Martin Kitzler designed a new typeface: his own handwriting. Basic shapes like the circle and the line produce every element needed for lettering at Zeitgeist Vienna. A handwriting gives the hotel an unmistakable character and makes it instantly recognizable. It is also the foundation of the wayfinding and signage system throughout the hotel.

In almost all our rooms, we avoided the usual hotel standard: “Closet on the left, bathroom on the right with shower, sink and toilet arranged in a circle, done.” Here, everything is different. Our rooms are carefully thought through to meet our guests’ needs as well as possible. For people who work a lot, or who like to work in bed, we developed a luggage rack that, when set up, matches the height of the desk and so serves as an extended work surface, or can be pushed up to the bed as an extra table.

A young mother is confronted with a cancer diagnosis and begins to paint during her oncology treatment. She sells these paintings and makes the proceeds available to other affected families, because affected families need support. The nonprofit association “Rosarote Zeiten” (“Rosy Times”) provides financial help here. We like the idea and the paintings: they hang in the Pergola and can be bought at the front desk. You can also support the association directly with a donation: www.rosarotezeiten.at

“Secrets are best whispered in the dark,” they say, but we greet our guests with a cozy light all the same. When guests step into their hotel room, our welcome light greets them, so they always feel welcome as they walk in and can find their way around more easily. Additional light comes from reading lights at the beds and dimmable desk lamps. In the bathroom, we installed mirrors lit from the front, since you do want to see yourself well when putting on makeup or shaving.

When we designed our restaurant, café & bar Pergola, it mattered a great deal to us to create as spacious a bar area as possible. On the one hand, our staff gets enough room to serve guests; on the other, the needs of the people doing the planning played a role too: plenty of space to hang around the bar in comfort. The starting point for the design of the bar counter, by the way, is a hugely enlarged photo of a snack that is very popular in Austria: a cabanossi, a thin cured sausage that, as a treat, fits the concept of a restaurant nicely and makes the perfect counterpart to the brown trout at the front desk on the opposite side. What’s more, as it cures, a cabanossi develops a strongly structured surface, which makes for a very appealing texture in digital editing.

Our restaurant, café & bar Pergola takes its name from the very object that the architect of the front desk and restaurant area, Horst Zauner, hung as a visual divider between the front desk and the restaurant, running across the entrance area and reaching out into the courtyard. The wooden object is modeled on a pergola of the kind often found outdoors in Mediterranean countries. The sculpture is made of rough-sawn oak; the hanging was planned and carried out to be just as rough and irregular as the surface of the wood: untamed, movable, changeable. Wood is “working” without pause, like the front desk. Because the individual elements are mounted loosely, the pergola can warp, and it does so constantly.

Remember the mirror texts in our hotel rooms? The text-covered wall behind the front desk, which every arriving and departing guest looks at, also carries lines from Hanno Millesi’s essay on the ideas of Zeitgeist and hotel. And the way the text is split into identical rectangles points back to the analog days of wooden cubbyholes, where room keys were kept with their enormously large fobs.

The part of the building that now houses Zeitgeist Vienna was originally planned as an office building. An office building with the inconspicuous, neutral plainness of a functional structure cannot be squared with the positioning a hotel needs. A hotel building is held to a different standard of outward appearance than an inward-looking office building. Accordingly, as part of the redesign, and within the limits of what was technically and legally feasible, the facade was given a personal touch.

Our courtyard garden is especially close to our hearts. In the middle of a densely built-up area of the city, we want to give our guests a place to relax, to enjoy themselves, or to be active and play. After a sightseeing tour or a business appointment, comfortable garden furniture and lounge chairs invite you to linger. Children can romp safe from traffic, and dogs are allowed. For guests who feel like staying active, we provide exercise equipment such as TRX, kettlebells and ropes, plus plenty of space for yoga. If you’d rather pass the time playing golf, badminton or bocce, all the courses and equipment are yours to choose from. You can also borrow bikes for tours through Vienna free of charge.

In designing the hotel, we put the greatest emphasis on individuality and originality. So why shouldn’t everyday objects be individually designed one-offs as well? The artist Bartholomäus Kinner designed and built one-of-a-kind constructions: signs, flyer displays, the rolling display case with card holder, the tent frame …

Many of our guests knew the heart and soul of the hotel personally: our guest favorite Mila would have loved to greet every visitor one by one, every day, from morning until night. To make sure that was still possible when Mila wasn’t out and about in the hotel, we installed an XXL version of her on the stairs in our green courtyard leading up to our meeting and event center Mezzanin. That way, Mila still keeps an eye on what’s going on (and on any treats that might be lying around) to this day.

The connection lies in where they come from: both the pictures by the photographer Jakob Huger and Zeitgeist Vienna have their roots in the Waldviertel region. This regional tie, combined with a modern, high-quality execution, creates a timeless aesthetic that shapes both the hotel and Jakob Huger’s work.