Review: The Rosewood Vienna

Published Feb 25 2025, 11:02 AM, Updated Feb 25 2025, 11:15 AMThe Rosewood Vienna is the best luxury hotel in Vienna. It is super stylish with the best rooftop restaurant and bar in Vienna, has really kind staff and feels like your own private home in Vienna. It’s so good that Taylor Swift had booked a stay here a week after us. She must have heard we’d just stayed!

Location

The Rosewood Vienna embraces Vianese design and is located in the heart of Vienna’s Old Town (across the street from the back of the Park Hyatt). Thus, it is perfectly positioned for exploring this stunning city on foot.

The hotel’s entrance is ideally located in the heart of Vienna’s Old Town, directly across the street from the back of the Park Hyatt. This prime spot makes it perfect for exploring the city on foot. For a more romantic arrival, horse-drawn carriages that tour the charming cobbled streets of the Old Town conveniently stop right outside the front door of this Rosewood hotel.

Style & Character

The hotel has an unusual design, with an impressive entranceway with kind doormen, but inside the hallway leads to residential apartments as well as to this Rosewood hotel. A lift takes you to the actual hotel entrance, which is a beautiful room packed with stunning plush luxury furnishings, and your Rosewood Vienna experience starts here.

What I loved most about this hotel is that when you are inside the hotel, you still feel like you are in Vienna. The parquet floors, the beautiful fresh flowers, and the fun artwork all fit perfectly with the theatrical architecture of Vienna’s buildings. The intricate coving and cornicing on the walls, the tabletop books showcasing the beauty of Vienna and the ornate detailing in every room remind you that you are in the center of all the history and beauty of this historic old town.

The double-paned wooden window frames offer views over some of Vienna’s most beautiful buildings, and the interior of the hotel mirrors or enhances this beauty. It’s easy to imagine that your Rosewood room is your very own apartment in Vienna.

Service & Facilities

The hotel has a spa and wellness center with a gym, but it is in the communal areas, the boutique lobby, and the rooftop restaurant and bar where you will likely spend most of your time. The rooftop restaurant and bar attracted guests, as well as sophisticated Viennese locals, taking in the fine dining and incredible views.

Rooms

Our room (an Executive Junior Suite) had a large entrance hall with beautiful parquet flooring, useful and hidden cupboards, a dressing table, and a big mirror. The walls throughout the hall, the bedroom, and the bathroom were littered with tasteful artwork designed in pale pink and blue hues to match the pink and blue hydrangeas blooming from vases in each room.

In the generous bedroom was a large bed with a long sofa set in front of it that looked towards a generously sized flat-screen TV. The bedroom side tables were usefully large, and there were plugs on each side of the bed (hurrah!), to charge devices.

A large wooden Art Deco drinks unit with rounded corners by the window containing the minibar, tea and coffee-making facilities, a kettle, and so forth. Next door to this was an extravagant cocktail trolley packed with glasses. I wonder whether anyone had created cocktails in this room. I’m not sure, but it looked very pretty with its sparkling metal handles and trays beside the art deco unit.

The ceiling of the main bedroom is also worth a mention. It was ornate with a multi-layered motif much like I would imagine the original ceilings in the building might have looked. Once again, the detailing here was thought about and beautiful.

The bathroom in this Junior Suite was “Grandiose.” The parquet floor continued through from the main bedroom, but the floor in the bathroom was mixed with marble, and the designer had placed a modern stand-alone bathtub by the window so that any bather could enjoy relaxing in the center of a room flooded with natural light. The double basin setup by the mirror had loads of space to put your toiletries on, and the entire basin unit was of a similar design to the art deco minibar and cocktail unit in the bedroom. It looked really cool.

The toilet was one of those unnerving TOTO toilets sitting alone in its own cubicle. There was a separate and huge marble shower cubicle next to the toilet with a really good shower and a marble bench. I liked the matt gold taps – every detail in our room was fun, uplifting, and luxurious.

Finally, the room had blackout curtains and a very, very comfy bed. Perfect for a good night’s sleep. At night you could pull a blind down and pull the curtains using a central master until beside your bed. That was fun but surprisingly fiddly to get the hang of.

The view from our bedroom was looking down over the main street, but it wasn’t noisy at all as the double panes blocked out almost all of the noise except for the merest hint of a church bell toll. We chose to enjoy the windows open for the most part, to feel part of the hubbub of the city. When you closed them, the room became eerily quiet, the only sound being a quiet hum from the air conditioning.

I particularly liked a Viennese street singer who sang opera along the main pedestrianized precinct. You could occasionally hear this brilliant street performance from our window. It was like having Pavarotti belting out “Nessun Dorma” underneath our room. Both this street performer and his accompanying flutist must have been part of the Vienna Opera. They were too good not to have been. The experience was magical.

Food & Drink

We stayed at the Rosewood Vienna for 2 nights. We had breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant both mornings and ate at their restaurant both evenings. We had intended to eat out locally instead, but the restaurant area was so stunning. Sitting in the rooftops of Vienna with the kind restaurant staff catering so brilliantly and delivering such mouthwatering food enticed us to spend both nights up there.

The interior of the rooftop restaurant is like a classy conservatory with angled glass windows looking out onto the surrounding rooftops. There is even more glasswork and steel, which holds the interior and exterior rooftop bar area together. This amazing structure sits on top of the historic building and provides a wonderful and huge, airy space for guests to dine.

You can dine in an inner rooftop terrace or grab a cocktail at the very top of the roof as the sun goes down. This whole restaurant area is bathed in natural light and is a stunning and bright space to enjoy breakfast, an afternoon coffee and cake, or dinner in the evening.

Breakfast was one of the best breakfasts we’ve ever had. The food was incredible and fresh, and the service was exceptional. The restaurant served locally sourced ingredients and it really showed in the flavors of everything we ate there. You can get this breakfast complimentary if you book your stay at this Rosewood via our luxury travel concierge along with hotel credit, welcome gifts and more.

The berries tasted so good, the eggs were delicious, and the smoked salmon was not the supermarket-bought salmon, which is shiny, slimy, and glistening. This locally sourced smoked salmon had a matt finish and was delivered in big chunks rather than slivers.

We were served by a lovely Asian man who gave us some great breakfast recommendations and encouraged our indulgence. We tried the incredible French Toast, which turned out to be one of the nicest things we’ve ever eaten, like the nicest doughnut ever with a side of vanilla custard sauce (I didn’t think I liked donuts, but this fried deliciousness was irresistible). I’m sure our French Toast knocked a couple of years off my and my husband’s longevity, but what indulgence!! There were also delicious egg dishes on offer in such generous portions that we were left both satisfied and gluttonous.

In the evening, we sat on the internal terrace, which was decorated with fairy lights, plant pots spouting greenery, and had views over the famous St. Peter’s Catholic Church (Peterskirche). If we had wanted even better views, we could have had a drink in the popular rooftop bar, which was one level up and offered sunset views over the whole of Vienna, but we preferred the slightly more spacious and peaceful restaurant terrace.

The food served in the evening was also incredible. The Rosewood has hired one of the best chefs in Vienna, without a doubt. I had the cod the first night and an Austrian Pasta the second. Both were beyond delicious with the sauces and sundries perfectly matching the main dish.

Conclusion

If you stay in Vienna it’s best to stay in the Old Town to “live” in the center of the beauty of Vienna. In the Old Town, the two best hotels are the Park Hyatt Vienna and the Rosewood, and while the Park Hyatt is very good, the Rosewood is the best. It is bright, airy, and full of beautiful decorations, furnishings, and flowers. It feels unequivocally Viennese. For us, no other hotel came close. The Rosewood is our favorite place to stay in Vienna.

The rooms here are generously proportioned and offer high ceilings, lots of stunning detailing and decorative moldings on the walls and ceilings, an expanse of parquet flooring with lavish sofas, enormous comfy beds, and bathrooms that are adorned with gold taps, stand-alone baths and huge showers and those blasted Japanese toilets with all the buttons on them.

We must especially mention the staff here as they were so warm and welcoming, and the French Toast at breakfast is the best French Toast I have ever had and is complimentary when you book via our luxury travel concierge. “Simply divine” is not enough of an accolade for the breakfast and the atmosphere in this wonderful, uplifting space in the mornings.

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