Hotel Bristol

Commissioned in 1899 by a consortium that included the pianist and future Polish prime minister Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the Bristol opened its doors in November 1901 on the corner of Krakowskie Przedmieście and Karowa. Władysław Marconi's façade, all confident sandstone and delicate iron balconies, staked a quiet claim: Warsaw, then still governed from Saint Petersburg, would have a hotel to rival anything in Vienna or Paris.

The building survived the twentieth century by virtue, mostly, of luck. It came through the 1944 Uprising largely intact — a rarity on this stretch of the boulevard — and reopened in staggered phases through the 1980s and 90s. A full restoration returned the Column Bar and the Malinowa dining room to something close to their original form; the marble, the etched glass, the coffered ceilings were painstakingly re-drawn from pre-war photography.

Today it operates under the Luxury Collection banner, but the character is entirely its own. Rooms lean towards understatement — heavy drapes, wide floorboards, the occasional writing desk positioned to catch the light off Piłsudski Square — and the service moves at the unhurried tempo of a house that has seen everything twice. Between the wars the ground-floor pavilion, now the Column Bar, held a small members' gaming room in the tradition of the great European casino-hotels of the period; a habit the building has since quietly retired.