This was published 15 years ago
Aria Hotel, Prague review: Chorus of approval
Top note ... the view from the Vrtbovska Garden to the hotel.
At Prague's award-winning Aria hotel, you can go to bed with Elvis or Mozart, writes Christina Pfeiffer.
You know times are changing when a little-known boutique hotel is voted the world's best in luxury by ordinary travellers. Prague's Aria Hotel beat a field including the Four Seasons Hotel George V in Paris and the Peninsula Hotel in Bangkok to win internet booking site TripAdvisor's Travellers' Choice Top 100 Best Luxury Hotels in the World award. Now in their seventh year, the awards are based on millions of internet reviews and opinions from travellers.
The Aria Hotel is a celebration of music, an important element of culture in the Czech Republic for centuries. Each floor of the hotel is dedicated to a genre - jazz, opera, classical or contemporary - so visitors can be surrounded by music for their entire stay.
Aria's 52 rooms are individually named after musical figures.
For a dose of Czech music, there are suites dedicated to Bedrich Smetana and Antonin Dvorak, but my favourite is the Elvis Presley, with a retro vibe and sunken bedroom.
Jazz fans will love the luxurious Billie Holiday loft suite with its sweeping staircase, cathedral-style ceilings and tranquil view of the Vrtbovska Garden next door.
But the best room in the house is the romantic two-bedroom suite dedicated to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who first visited Prague as a child prodigy and later returned to premiere his famous opera Don Giovanni.
The decor in each room is unique but all are shrines to the composer, singer or musician whose name they bear.
Cartoon caricatures of Elvis, Louis Armstrong, Verdi and Smetana hang on the walls, carpets are emblazoned with music notes and shelves are stocked with books that refer to the chosen icon.
Each suite is equipped with a surround-sound stereo system controlled by a computer programmed with historic information and music from the chosen musician. Rooms also have flat-screen televisions and iPods loaded with songs by every musician represented in the hotel.
Black plastic room keys are shaped like treble clefs and embedded with magnetised buttons to wave at door scanners.
In the lobby, the song remains the same.
An eye-catching feature is the mosaic floor, which is decorated with notes from an ancient Gregorian chant. The pattern leads from the wrought-iron gates at the hotel's entrance, through the reception area and into the Winter Garden. It entices you into the airy indoor Winter Garden conservatory, where natural light streams onto the concert grand piano, palms and rattan settees.
Musical performances are held here three times a week, while breakfast, lunch and dinner are served here daily. The plates, mugs, serviettes and wall hangings are all painted boldly with whimsical caricatures of famous musicians by Prague's Josef Blecha.
A chat with Aria Hotel's music director, Ivana Stehlikova, is the best way to get up to speed on centuries of Czech music history.
Stehlikova, who holds a PhD in musicology from Charles University in Prague, is a fount of musical knowledge.
She offers guests advice and bookings for any musical event in Prague, promising to find something to suit every taste, from classical to country, jazz to pop.
"The Czech kingdom was the cradle of music within the Austro-Hungarian Empire," she says. It was during that era that classical music flourished and Prague produced world-class composers such as Dvorak and Smetana.
The hotel's music library has more than 3000 CDs, many by Czech artists.
I pick a pile by contemporary artists - the jazzy Milan Svoboda, the versatile Dan Barta and the vibrant sounds of pop diva Iva Fruhlingova (a well-known Czech model who sings in French).
Instead of listening to them on my in-room surround-sound system, I spend an evening playing DJ at my own private concert in the hotel's seven-seat entertainment chamber, the Music Box. It's the perfect way to get in tune.
The writer was as a guest of Korean Air and Aria Hotel.
TRIP NOTES
Getting there
Korean Air (koreanair.com) flies from Sydney and Brisbane to Prague via Seoul. Phone 9262 6000 (Sydney) or (07) 3226 6000 (Brisbane).
Staying there
Aria Hotel, Trziste 9, 11800, Prague 1, Czech Republic, phone +420 225 334 111 or see aria.cz. Rack rates start from EUR212 ($360). Guests are offered free entry to the Vrtbovska Garden, a UNESCO World Heritage landmark, next door to the hotel.
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