The hotel had the ability to cater to 400 guests and employed 200 staff to cater to their whims and needs. Opened in 1896 with 350 rooms, the Grand Hotel Royal was one of Europe’s largest hotels at the time, and most definitely one of the most luxurious, too, just like another fictional hotel. The hotel still had a large staff in 1991 (c) The Corinthia Hotel Budapest Wandering the different corridors, rooms, crossing glass bridges under the large atrium and past intricate ironwork covering the lobby, which itself cascades up three levels as you enter the hotel, its scale and grandeur reminded me of Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel. “Sometimes I walk about 15km per day,” Gábor, the Director of Communications told me as he guided me round the labyrinthine corridors, while I took notes for another assignment.
I reached for my phone to check how much I had done on my pedometer, I was sure we walked for a couple kilometres by now. On a tour of the hotel, I felt confused as we turned in from one room to the next, through the grand suites that take up the entire façade of the hotel, and its hidden rooftop gardens by the residences and on top of the ballroom. Today the Corinthia Hotel might embody the international luxury of this global brand whose ancestral home lies in Malta, but the hotel had another name once – the Grand Hotel Royal. But if you take a look up at its winged façade bridged with glass, crowned by cupolas and a grandeur harkening back to another age, the echo of the Corinthia’s fin de siècle grandeur still lingers. Located amidst the bistros and elegant apartment blocks punctuated by traffic and the yellow tram that never sleeps, it’s easy to miss out of the beauty of this old hotel.
On the busy streets of the Grand Boulevard, the Corinthia Hote l blends in with the decadent architecture of downtown Budapest.
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