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HOTELS & RESTAURANTS, beyond mainstream

Blue, Brass and the Danube: Inside Vienna’s Riverside Escape

Stella Manferdini

HOTELS & RESTAURANTS, beyond mainstream

13.08.25

Keywords:

Creations , High-end hospitality , Vienna

Along the north bank of the Danube, where Vienna’s urban fabric softens into the green edges of the river, Hilton Vienna Waterfront has re-emerged after a complete transformation by international design studio THDP. The building itself carries the weight of history: a former grain silo dating from 1911, its industrial bones remain visible beneath a newly fluid, contemporary language. The result is a hotel that anchors itself in the past yet turns, without hesitation, towards a cosmopolitan, riverside future.

Courtesy of Hilton Vienna Waterfront

The redesign is not a single gesture but a layered response to place. THDP drew directly on the silo’s working heritage and the mutable colours of the river, bringing them into rooms and public spaces through materials, textures and patterns. Deep blues and rusted oranges recall water and metal, while warm neutrals temper the palette with a sense of ease. Woven rattan wall coverings, digitally printed to reference Vienna’s design lineage and the work of Thonet and Wittmann, bridge industrial memory with artisanal refinement. Green stone table tops nod to the hue of the Danube under certain skies, while geometric carpets quietly evoke the machinery and repetition of the building’s past life.

Across 340 rooms and suites, the refurbishment is more evolution than reinvention. Layouts remain generous, but soft furnishings, lighting and flooring have been re-coloured and re-textured to open the interiors to both the river and the city. Seating areas have been reimagined – a chaise longue here, a sofa bed there – not as mere amenities but as invitations to pause, to watch the Danube’s changing surface or the activity of the Handelskai below. The top-floor Executive Lounge extends this idea, offering a workspace with a horizon line of water and sky.

Courtesy of Hilton Vienna Waterfront

Public spaces carry the same narrative of connection. The new OXBO restaurant and bar place the river at the centre of both menu and mood. Regional produce and seasonal ingredients form the backbone of the kitchen, while the terrace allows guests to eat almost at the water’s edge. The bar’s design borrows from the silhouettes of riverside cranes, recasting them in polished brass, copper and walnut. Dark bronze arms support a display structure that serves cocktails, beer and coffee with equal ceremony. The intention, as THDP co-founder Nicholas J Hickson notes, was to enhance both function and atmosphere – expanding capacity while deepening the sense of place.

Meetings and events, too, take their cue from the river. More than 1,200 square metres of bright, flexible space can be adapted for business or celebration, with daylight and views breaking down the usual separation between work and leisure. The notion of “bleisure” – the blending of business and leisure travel – feels almost natural here, given the hotel’s geography: twenty minutes from both the airport and the historic centre, yet pressed right up against the water.

Courtesy of Hilton Vienna Waterfront

Beyond its interiors, Hilton Vienna Waterfront makes full use of its location. The outdoor pool sits within a green terrace, the Danube’s broad channel stretching beyond; in summer, it becomes less a hotel amenity than part of a larger riverside lifestyle. Guests can walk or cycle the paths of Danube Island, explore Leopoldstadt’s Prater park or markets, or retreat to the spa, where three saunas – one panoramic – frame the water as an essential part of the wellness experience. Even the palette here, creamy woods and soft neutrals, is drawn from the nearby Donau-Auen National Park, extending the outdoors inward.

Sustainability has been embedded alongside aesthetics. The hotel operates entirely on renewable energy, uses water-saving fixtures, AI to minimise food waste, and sources the majority of its menu from local suppliers. Window films improve energy efficiency; herbs are grown on site. In this, as in its design, the Hilton Vienna Waterfront attempts to balance contemporary demands with long-term responsibility – a kind of stewardship appropriate to a building that has already seen more than a century of change.

Courtesy of Hilton Vienna Waterfront

Vienna has a long tradition of folding the old into the new – from bentwood café chairs to Hundertwasser’s kaleidoscopic facades, from chocolate-laden shop windows to industrial relics remade for a different age. In its latest incarnation, Hilton Vienna Waterfront inhabits that tradition fully. It is a place to work, to linger, to watch the light shift on the river – a hotel that makes the Danube not simply a view, but a companion.