Hotel Josefine

Hotel Josefine

Esterházygasse 33 sits on a quiet residential street in Mariahilf, one block off the retail crush of Mariahilfer Straße and a fourteen minute walk from Wien Westbahnhof, in a Gründerzeit townhouse that has operated as a hotel for more than a century and was gutted and rebuilt in 2021. The property reopened in 2022 as an independent boutique concept under the name Hotel Josefine, forty nine rooms across a building with split level floors that keep the lift stopping short of half the doors, and in April 2026 it was absorbed into the Eurostars Hotel Company portfolio, owned by Grupo Hotusa, the Barcelona group founded in 1977 by Amancio López Seijas and still run by him, under a lease agreement brokered with Daniel Jelitzka's JP Real Estate Group, the fourth Eurostars address in Vienna alongside the Grand Hotel Wien, the Embassy and the Exe. The interiors run on a single invented premise, a fictional aristocrat named Josefine de Bourblanc who is said to have fled the Russian Revolution and settled into number 33, and the design team built an entire 1920s and 30s surrealist household around her, green marble, brass fittings, crystal chandeliers, walls of collage and typewritten fragments in the corridors. Downstairs, Barfly's Club runs a cocktail programme through the same green marble and mirrored glass, and next to it La Phonotek holds a listening room stocked with more than 3,000 vinyl records, Cole Porter and Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie among them, working as a small archive of the era the hotel is built to evoke. Breakfast arrives plated rather than buffet, tiered trays in the style of an afternoon salon, and it is the one element guests mention without qualification. None of the Josefine de Bourblanc story is real, which the hotel does not pretend otherwise about, and the effect is closer to a small theatre set than a restoration, every surface pointed at a mood rather than a fact. That reads as a strength in the public rooms, where the density of detail rewards the kind of guest who reads labels and looks behind doors, and as a limitation upstairs, where rooms run small by design hotel standards and service consistency varies by shift, attentive and warm by most accounts, brisk to the point of curtness by others. It suits a one or two night stay built around the bar and the street outside more than a base for unpacking. You should not come if you want the hush and square footage of a heritage palace hotel, reliable central air on a hot week, or a lift that reaches your floor without a half flight of stairs at the end. You should come for a small, theatrical, character driven stay a few minutes off Mariahilfer Straße, with a bar and a record room worth an evening on their own, and a breakfast worth setting an alarm for. The short version: A 49 room design hotel in Vienna's Mariahilf district, inside a Gründerzeit townhouse rebuilt in 2021, staged around an invented 1920s backstory, a 3,000 record listening room, and a green marble basement bar, now part of Grupo Hotusa's Eurostars portfolio.