For the past fifty years, it’s fair to say no hotel in Prague has woven its way more deeply into the fabric of the city – or divided popular opinion as profoundly -- as the Intercontinental Hotel, the Fairmont Golden Prague’s predecessor.
Right from the start, in the early 1970s, the hotel’s Brutalist design, led by Czech architect Karel Filsak, generated controversy. The original fear was that the trademark Brutalist elements, including the hotel's rigid geometric shape, exposed concrete cladding, and oversized strips of decorative ceramic tiling, wouldn’t blend well into the surrounding historic architecture of Prague’s Old Town and former Jewish Quarter.
This, of course, was during Brutalism’s heyday, and not only in the former Eastern bloc. The Washington D.C. metro system, Boston’s City Hall and London’s Barbican Centre are all prestigious examples of the style’s reach and influence at the time. Brutalism takes its name from the French term for raw concrete (béton brut), and Brutalist buildings – with their unapologetically rough facades -- felt fresh at a time when architects were tiring of the featureless modern glass-and-steel skyscrapers that emerged after World War II. Brutalism was also the unofficial house style back then of the worldwide InterContinental brand, the epitome of postwar, jet-set luxury.
Perhaps to soften the edges of the hotel’s exterior, the original interior incorporated works from the best local artists and craftsmen active in the 1960s and ‘70s. The list of contributors reads like a “Who’s Who” of postwar Czechoslovak design. Some of the best-known names include Hugo Demartini, René Roubíček, Stanislav Libenský, Jaroslava Brychtová, Miloslav Hejný, Josef Jíra and Jiří Rathouský, creator of the hotel’s original logo (see photos).
The hotel got the green light and opened for guests on December 7, 1974.
Over the decades, the Intercontinental has hosted many household names – both famous and some infamous. A look at the guest list includes international performers like Ray Charles, Elton John, Michael Jackson and Luciano Pavarotti, as well as politicians such as U.S. presidents Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and former Czech President Václav Havel (who signed the guest book on display in the lobby on December 15, 1989). Hollywood actors and film luminaries who stayed here include Meryl Streep, Jane Fonda, Miloš Forman and Tom Cruise (among many others).
On the less-desirable side of the ledger, in the late-1970s and early ‘80s, the hotel was occasionally used by the Czechoslovak secret police, the StB, as a safe house and – incredibly – even served as a temporary home for international terrorists like Carlos the Jackal and Abu Daoud (the mastermind of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games massacre). The Guardian newspaper recounts an anecdote from August 1979, when Carlos locked himself out of his room and got so mad that he actually ran down the corridor shouting and waving a gun. The mind boggles at the prospect of Carlos and Nixon – or perhaps Carlos and Elton John? – accidentally bumping into each in the hallway one evening.
The presence of all these luminaries over the years, combined with whispered stories of hidden intrigue, bestowed on the hotel a certain mystique. I got a small reminder of the Intercontinental's karmic reach into the Prague psyche a few years ago when I took a specialized guided tour of the city, from Pragulic tours, led by a homeless person named Karim. During the tour, Karim told us that when he'd worked the streets years ago, he always looked forward to those nights when he could find a good dumpster to sleep in – an "Interconti" in street slang. In other words, the best accommodation one could get.
I also had the privilege of staying here on several occasions, from 1987 to 1989, while on reporting trips to Prague from my home base in Vienna. Indeed, the Intercontinental was one of the few Prague hotels I was permitted to book as a Western journalist (the others being the Ambassador and the Esplanade – both still running as I write this article). I experienced both the good and the weird.
On the positive side, the twentysomething me always enjoyed staying at such a prestigious address. Part of my job was to interview government ministers and company heads and I harbored the illusion that simply dropping the “Intercontinental” name in our conversations somehow imparted my presence at the time with some much-needed gravitas.
That said, by the mid-1980s, the hotel was “luxury” in name only. The rooms were tiny and, by then, thoroughly worn out. The lobby bar, as I wrote in my book “Čas proměn,” was definitely on the sleazier side. Many nights, it was ringed by attractive single women hovering over cocktails and looking for some “conversation.” I’d occasionally ask them personal details -- small talk -- about their lives. Things like what they were interested in or did outside of the hotel. The answer was invariably the same. They were “law students” (the law school is located next door to the hotel) and taking a break from class or homework. I had never seen law students like that before in my life.
All these memories of the old “Interconti” might have faded into a mellow, vaguely positive sense of nostalgia had it not been for my discovering the existence of my own StB surveillance file after publishing my book in 2021. I'd been aware back then that my presence as a foreign journalist would have elicited the attention of the Czechoslovak secret police, but until an astute reader of my book surfaced my own file in the state security archives in 2022, I had no idea how closely integrated the hotel staff had been in that surveillance effort.
Reading through the file, I learned the secret police had hatched an elaborate plan to try to recruit me as an agent. On one day in June 1989, as part of that effort, police operatives, including members of the hotel’s own reception desk, officially monitored and reported my every movement -- from when I woke up in my room (no 808, according to the file) through the entire day. If you’d like to read more about my file, I wrote a five-part series on this blog about “Operation INTER” (“Inter” was my StB code name – perhaps taken from the name of the hotel itself). I’ve included here a few photos from my file to show you what I mean about the hotel.
This new-found knowledge of my surveillance file inevitably colored my memories of the hotel from those days. The files didn’t reveal anything earth-shattering or untoward, but they did pierce my own illusions of invulnerability back then in ways I’m still processing.
All of which brings me to the present day and re-opening of the Intercontinental as the brand new Fairmont Golden Prague. I think they've done a tremendous job.
Brutalism’s superpower – often unrealized -- has always involved a certain alchemy: to take every-day, humdrum building materials like exposed concrete, oxidized metals, wood, ceramics, and glass and use them – usually in abstract settings -- to create texture and mood. The architects who carried out the Fairmont renovation, led by Marek Tichý at the Prague studio TaK, clearly understood this. The lobby’s newly exposed concrete ceiling, for example, creates an element of calm as you enter from Prague’s busy Old Town. Pieces of glass along the wall of the new wellness spa have been re-imagined as a shimmering green-blue mosaic, and the perfect backdrop to the spa’s implicit promise of health and beauty. There are countless other examples. (Tichý, by coincidence, was also lead architect for the last big Prague renovation project I wrote about for this blog: the re-opening of the Functionalist Vila Volman in the Prague suburb of Čelákovice.)
The renovation team also went to great lengths to preserve the original interior objets d'art that had so enriched the old Intercontinental and softened the hotel’s brutal edges. As I toured the Fairmont in June, I immediately recognized many of them from the 1980s. These included Miloslav Hejný’s slightly risqué wooden totems off the lobby, René Roubíček’s jagged glass chandeliers, Hugo Demartini’s glass-bauble ceiling lights in the upper-floor Zlatá Praha (Golden Prague) restaurant, and especially Josef Jíra’s stained-glass windows in the breakfast room. Sadly, many older pieces have disappeared over the decades as the hotel changed ownership several times.
The Fairmont’s links to the Intercontinental’s heritage can also be seen in the ways the new architects sought to connect the hotel thematically to the city of Prague itself. This guiding principle of the original interior is often overlooked, but designers in the 1970s were encouraged (required) to pair their hyper-modern design objects with more-staid looking historical and folkloric furniture that appeared straight out of a Czech fairy tale. The results often clashed in practice. To see what I mean, check out the photo of the original chairs and tables used in the Zlatá Praha restaurant – juxtaposed with Demartini’s futuristic ceiling lamp above.
Thankfully, those fusty old chairs and sofas have now been replaced by a consistent, clean aesthetic throughout. The ties to Prague and Czech history, instead, are now more subtle. My favorite of the Fairmont’s new installations is by Czech artist Martin Janecký and meant to evoke the traditional house signs seen on older Prague buildings (see photo). The hotel is also keen to reference Prague’s film and movie-making roots. The lobby bar has been dubbed the “Coocoo’s Nest,” a nod to Forman’s Oscar-winning film, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Jiří Menzel’s gleaming Oscar statuette, for his film “Closely Watched Trains,” stands proudly in the lobby’s curio cabinet. The upper lounge is now called “Golden Eye,” but curiously this isn't a reference to the 1995 James Bond film of the same name, but rather to the sunlight as it glints off the Vltava River below.
I could go on about the new Fairmont – about the many new restaurants and lounges; the hotel's larger, more luxurious rooms; the eye-catching, spire-filled views from the terrace bar and Old Town-facing rooms; the new fitness center, with its indoor-outdoor pool; and the new public-friendly, river-facing layout (never a strong suit of the old Intercontinental) that now connects the hotel to Vltava River and opens the space to the general public. I encourage readers to see the Fairmont for themselves. It's stunning.
And what about all those old ghosts from the 1980s? That might be the best part of all. As I toured the hotel and felt fuzzy, long-buried memories resurface, I noticed that the musty smell of the old regime – a scent that had lingered on well after 1989 – was entirely gone. They've made a clean break with the past.
All this finery comes with a price. A quick check on Booking.com for a double room this summer shows room rates starting at around 13,000 Czech crowns (525 euros) a night. Clearly not everyone can afford to stay here (that said, the general public is encouraged to drop by and terrace views can still be had for the price of a coffee). Of course, it would be a shame if it turns out that the only way to make a Brutalist building attractive and lovable requires spending tens of millions of euros to renovate a structure that only a small percentage of the population can enjoy. My hope, though, is that the new Fairmont encourages people to give Brutalism a fresh look as a style worth preserving -- and that's not a bad thing at all.
(Scroll past the map for more photos)
Did you like the story and want to add your own experiences? Or maybe help me to correct something I didn’t get right? Write me at bakermark@fastmail.fm.
