What’s New in Vienna

Two weeks ago, I was invited to speak at the Austrian Excellence conference in Vienna, and it offered me a chance to spend 36 hours in the capital, which is one of my favorites. I love the city for how tangible its history feels. It’s not hard to imagine Sisi sitting in a box at the Opera or Freud, Klimt or Josef Hoffman ambling to a coffee house for hours of spirited debate. But it is also a city that feels very much alive with a quiet kind of innovation. In fact, the word “excellence” captures the understated kind of innovation embodied by four of the city’s new openings.

This March, one of the most important houses in European modernism opened to the public for the first time in its nearly 100-year history. Villa Beer was completed in 1930 for Julius and Margarete Beer, a cultured Jewish industrialist couple who rejected the Art Nouveau style of neighboring mansions in affluent Hietzing. Instead, they commissioned Josef Frank and Oskar Wlach to design something radically forward-looking. Frank, unlike contemporaries including Le Corbusier—who famously stated a home should be “a machine for living in”—insisted that architecture serve individual comfort over standardized functionality. Villa Beer is the fullest expression of that philosophy: sculptural staircases draw you across split levels and shifting sightlines, cozy nooks open up within the larger open-plan spaces, and vast floor-to-ceiling windows flood the interior with light. After decades of neglect, a painstaking 10-million-euro restoration has revived every detail, down to 3D-printed light switches that replicate the exact click of the 1930s originals and custom rubber flooring manufactured in Italy to match the precise shade of green Frank specified. The top floor is now furnished by Svenskt Tenn—the Stockholm firm where Frank, after fleeing Vienna in 1933, became one of the fathers of Scandinavian design—as part of an artists-in-residence program.

Visitors can book guided tours or weekend time slots to explore independently, and the villa is also available for intimate dinners and private events.

MAK

The museum’s “Vienna 1900” Gallery (among others) is back

Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) has been on a remarkable run under general director Lilli Hollein—whose brother Max leads the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—and whose contract was just renewed for another five years through 2031. In February, the museum unveiled a sweeping reinstallation of its “Vienna 1900” permanent collection rooms, developed in collaboration with contemporary artist Markus Schinwald. The new presentation breaks with the previous chronological approach, instead organizing masterworks by Klimt, Hoffmann, Moser and the Wiener Werkstätte around themes and ideas, with artistic interventions that draw unexpected connections to the present. A month later, the museum also reopened its textiles and carpets galleries in a striking new presentation developed with Studio FormaFantasma.

The grand, neoclassical Palais Coburg, built atop Vienna’s Renaissance-era fortification walls, is reopening in July after an extensive renovation of all 36 suites, a new wellness and spa center, and a redesigned fitness area with direct access to the garden. Each suite is individually styled and named after a member of the Coburg-Gotha dynasty. Throughout the renovation, the two-Michelin-starred Silvio Nickol restaurant and the legendary wine cellars—six vaulted chambers holding more than 60,000 bottles—have remained open, giving guests a reason to visit even before the suites debut.

Founded in Vienna in 2012 by Jérôme Bacquias, a Frenchman who left the consulting world to pursue something he could hold in his hands, Paper Republic has grown into one of Europe’s leading makers of handcrafted leather notebooks. Every journal is produced in the company’s Vienna workshop using vegetable-tanned vachetta leather from a family-run tannery in Tuscany, hand-stitched and designed to be refilled and carried for life—and each personalized order ships with a Polaroid of its maker inside. Last October, Paper Republic opened La Maison, its first boutique, on Sonnenfelsgasse in the heart of the First District. Set inside a 400-year-old baroque building with vaulted ceilings, the shop doubles as a café and atelier—a place to slow down, flip through the vinyl collection and run your fingers over the leather before choosing a companion for the road.