River cruising, Europe: Uniworld's Maria Theresa is a ship fit for an empress

On the outside, Maria Theresa presents the sort of sleek minimalism that would suit a Scandinavian toothpaste baron. I head up the gangway towards a 21st-century ship the taut white lines of which give no hint of the madness within. Yet beyond the gliding glass doors lies a shimmering 18th-century palace of gold leaf and chandelier crystals. The wobble-chinned, heaving-bosomed empress herself looms from a portrait large as a Hollywood billboard. Around it curves a double staircase designed for grand entrances, making me think I should have packed my whale-bone hoops and best wig.

As first impressions go, Maria Theresa has an impact before any of its 150 guests even make it across the lobby's marble rink to the reception desk. Thank heavens for a cruise company that hasn't retreated into bland, on-trend design. Why would you want to spend a week in a Freedom-furniture showroom? Why in a travel world of same-same airports and hotel rooms would you want more of the same on your river ship?

Sure, Maria Theresa's decor isn't to my taste, but I admire the commitment. In fact, I hugely enjoy it. Travel is about immersing yourself in novel environments, not about seeking out what you have at home. Don't give me a beige sofa. Give me a plump blue sofa, as studded with buttons and tassels as a Hapsburg general's uniform. By the time I've been a week on this Danube ship, I begin to think I too should have light sconces in my home held up by bare-breasted nymphs, and a leopard-skin banquette for evening cocktails.

Uniworld's mad interior designs differ from one vessel to another, but share the same lack of restraint, eye-popping fabric patterns and wild colour. What's so pleasing is that there is full commitment to the decor. There's no exception for its largest and one of its most recent vessels, Maria Theresa. A crown is embossed on the floor of my shower, 18th-century prints line cabin walls, mirrors everywhere are aged with liver-spots to look as if they've been appropriated from an Austrian palace back in the days when mirrors were the ultimate in luxury.

This ship has more French gilt legs than you see at the Folies Bergere, a greenhouse-worth of fresh flowers and enough gold leaf to make a baroque bishop feel inadequate. Only the sun deck, scattered with loungers and tables, and running the whole ship's length, abandons baroque decor. The overall impression of shimmering, shining opulence makes me feel I've wandered into Vienna's Schonbrunn Palace – appropriate on a ship that plies the Danube through the Hapsburg heartland.

I doubt Austrian empress Maria Theresa lived this well, however. No chamber pots nor chilly draughts disgrace my cabin (number 328, category two), just a lot of mod cons beneath the 18th-century veneer, including both US and Australian power points, Egyptian cotton sheets, gushing showers, heated bathroom floors and high-tech touch buttons that produce pleasing lighting effects. The TV, concealed behind a mirror, would have been denounced as sorcery in the old days. Even I feel that it's a little bit magic.

Did Maria Theresa the empress have a cinema? I think not. But Maria Theresa the ship has one, rather plush, with romantic two-seaters in buttoned blue velvet and old Hedy Lamarr cinema posters on the walls. (The glamorous screen seductress of the golden age was, I discover, Austrian.) Nor did the empress have a mosaic-encrusted swimming pool, a very handy self-service laundry, nor a massage room (rather grandly called a spa). By the looks of her full-length portrait, if she ever had a fitness room, it went unused.

Other public areas on Maria Theresa include the Leopard Bar at the rear of the ship, the pleasing dove-grey decor of which provides my eyeballs with a rest as I knock back my River Cosmo (vodka, triple sec, pineapple and cranberry juices). The ship's main Hapsburg Lounge is a spectacle of blue-velvet sofas on which to swoon, and murals depicting bucolic 18th-century Austrian life. Curtains are as ruffled as a cancan dancer's skirt, and porcelain ginger jars add a touch of chinoiserie. This is the place for lectures, leafing through coffee-table books, good coffees, more cocktails. A compact Vienna-style cafe of cast-iron and marble tables, graced with erupting orchids, channels a more turn-of-century atmosphere. You could perhaps discuss your neuroses here over a slice of the Sachertorte that turns slowly in a glass case like some exotic museum-treasure of a lost civilisation. The mostly retired American passengers, though, seem a happier lot, tucking into toffee apples and hotdogs.