May 31, 2010

Keep your door locked at the Hotel Rosslyn…

I suppose if you wait long enough, you’ll live to see the seemingly improbable happen as buildings get renovated and reused.

For example, there’s the case of the former Café Royal at 68 Regent Street in London, the once-fashionable late-supper haunt of both Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill. The place was steeped in legend, intrigue and even unsolved murder (with a night porter found shot with two bullets in his head). Last year’s blockbuster Sherlock Holmes film was partly set there. It seems everybody passed through at some point, and even celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay had his wedding reception in the place. A couple of posh Masonic lodges used to meet on the premises in a special room (dining afterwards), though in more recent years the lodge room was redeveloped as the Elysium nightclub. So for several years, there was vigorous discoing on the spot where previously the “third degree” was given to trembling candidates. Now it’s all gone, as this part of Regent Street undergoes yet another transformation.

If that’s the kind of heritage building you enjoy seeing, we have a new stopping point for you to add to your travel itinerary — the glamourous new boutique property in Budapest called the Hotel Rosslyn, now restored to its prewar appearance (as above). The “Rosslyn” name was picked by the developers to convey a bit of mysterious buzz, as the building is the former Symbolic Grand Lodge of Hungary. Freemasonry became legal in the Hungarian kingdom after the Austro-Hungarian compromise of 1867, and the members (mostly well-to-do, left-leaning bourgeois with a secularist bent) built this opulent building at Podmaniczky 45. Today, the hotel seems delighted to offer jaded accountants and marketing managers a chance to hold their conferences in the former temple chamber, perhaps adding a bit of spice to what would otherwise be dull proceedings.

Other hotels in a similar vein are the Schlosshotel Rosenau in Austria (covered in our book), the Hotel Stern in Coire (Chur), Switzerland and Hyatt’s Andaz Liverpool Street Hotel (with a temple chamber worthy of the Magic Flute).

As for ‘trading places,’ it’s worth noting that the Grand Lodge of France is housed in a former Franciscan church (8, rue Puteaux in Paris), while the Sacred Heart parish in Geneva is based in a former Swiss Masonic temple… Sursum Corda.