The Grand Hotel de l'Europe is a hotel in Bad Gastein, in the province of Salzburg housed in a historic building.
The Grand Hotel de l'Europe was built between 1906 and 1909 as a late historic building according to plans by the cathedral master builder Matthäus Schlager. The building was renovated in 1982. To the south of the hotel is an Art Nouveau pavilion of the metalworking shop Thilo to a design by Leopold Führer. The building houses the Gastein Museum, apartment buildings, a restaurant and an event hall.
De l'Europe Gastein History
When Linz railway station restaurateur Viktor Sedlacek had a luxury hotel built in the center of the spa town from 1906 to 1909 by Bad Gastein master builder Angelo Comini (according to plans by Linz cathedral master builder Matthäus Schlager) and this was inaugurated on May 29, 1909, it was one of the ten largest and most modern hotels in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After financial difficulties, Alfred Sedlacek, son of the builder Viktor Sedlacek, sold the hotel in 1970 to Alpenländische Hotel- und Kuranstalt AG, which however did not continue the hotel business. Ten years passed before Reinhardt Stefan Tomek, the son of a Viennese doctor, brought the hotel back to life with the reopening on 22 December 1982 and 170 permanent jobs. Thanks to extensive renovations and numerous events, he managed to give Bad Gastein a touch of the Monte Carlo of the Alps. However, the financial burden was too great for him, so he had to close the company in 1988. Over the course of the history, numerous members of various royal families (King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, King Faisal I of Iraq, Ibn Saud, Shah of Persia) as well as industrialists (Wilhelm Opel), writers and musicians (Heinrich Mann, Robert Stolz, William Somerset Maugham, Liza Minnelli). The entire hotel complex with its apartments has been a historical building since 1980. Until 2015 there was a Casinos Austria casino on the ground floor. The Gastein Museum, which is one of the oldest museums in the state outside the city of Salzburg, has also been based in the Grand Hotel since 2011, as the former home of Haus Austria was sold.