The Neo-Renaissance Grand Hotel was built in 1868–1870, originally as a four-storey apartment building. In 1874 it was converted into a 124-room hotel, conveniently located near the main railway station. The four-wing building surrounds two courtyards separated by a fifth wing. In 1895 the hotel was acquired by the Brno-based Siegl & Company. Its main partners were the Brno factory owners Anton I. Siegl and Arnold Grünfeld, and the other partners were Friedrich Wannieck, also a factory owner, and Arthur Crespin, a civil engineer from Paris. Crespin had initially purchased the hotel in 1877 along with the engineer and successful painter Franz von Felbinger, the son-in-law of the original owner, Josef Werner, and it was these two who gave the hotel the name Grand.
In 1901, the Siegl company commissioned a four-storey extension the original building’s rear wing along Novobranská Street (though facing Benešova). The design was drawn up by architects Ernst Lindner and Theodor Schreier, who from 1897 to 1906 ran a joint studio in Vienna and who had both studied under Karel König at Vienna’s Technical University. In Brno, they had previously (in 1898) submitted a design for the Neo-Renaissance Moravian-Silesian Mutual Insurance Company on today’s náměstí Svobody. Although they did not win the contract, their participation in the tender may have given them some local exposure.
A large salon on the addition’s ground floor initially housed a French restaurant. The upper floors of the triple-pile building had hotel rooms facing both streets. Since a renovation project in 19861988, there have been eight rooms on each floor, meaning 24 in total. The hotel’s current total capacity is 115 rooms. On the side facing Novobranská Street, the facade respects the Neo-Renaissance facade composition of the main building, while its southern elevation is structured in an organic Art Nouveau style whose five-bay facade is dominated by a four-bay avant-corps framed by conically shaped wall sections and accentuated by a tall hip roof. The stylized organic stuccowork, rendered in polychrome pastel colours, seems to grow from the facade while framing the painting of the Judgement of Paris on the gable, which is sheltered by a glass canopy. The author of the painting has yet to be determined. Although Linder and Schreier were not committed adherents of Art Nouveau, with this building they produced perhaps the most consistent work of organic Art Nouveau in Brno, a building with the vital focus typical of the early phase of the style and one to which the artists who created the paintings and stuccowork made a significant contribution. The authorship of these works was long unknown, with possible candidates being Hubert Gessner and even Josef Maria Olbrich. The issue was only resolved with the discovery of an article from the local Tagesbote newspaper.
Period photographs preserved at the hotel show that metal and glass – a combination that further enhanced the building’s radical Art Nouveau character – were used to a greater extent than was previously known. The addition is set back deep from Benešova Street, as the space in front was occupied by a coach house (today, the Le Grand restaurant stands in its place). In order to facilitate passage from the street to the salon on the addition’s ground floor, a covered metal-frame passage – richly decorated with wrought-iron ornamentation and with a glass ceiling and wall similar to the canopy over the proscenium arch on the addition – was built along the side of the main hotel building. Stained glass on the walls was decorated with vegetal designs, which also adorned the borders of the glass ceiling. Older photographs show that the Art Nouveau facade has been altered and simplified over the years, and that it was once adorned with an inscription of the hotel’s name on the third-floor apron wall underneath the painting of the Judgement of Paris.
Aleš Filip