Among the most ornate surviving Art Nouveau facades in Riga's Old Town — a city that holds one of the densest concentrations of Jugendstil architecture anywhere in Europe — the early twentieth-century building housing Neiburgs Hotel announces itself with characteristic Latvian exuberance: stucco female masks, barley-twist columns, and deeply modelled foliate cartouches pressed into its ochre-painted facade. The conversion, completed in 2012, preserved the building's elaborate plasterwork ceiling cornices intact, leaving them to coexist with a decidedly contemporary interior sensibility — patterned Moroccan-inflected wallpaper panels serving as headboards, herringbone parquet underfoot, and black adjustable task lamps substituting for period lighting. The lobby library, with its floor-to-ceiling dark timber shelving and a pair of low-slung purple channel-back armchairs that sit somewhere between 1970s Italian and contemporary Scandinavian, captures the hotel's broader approach: period architecture held lightly, furnished with conviction rather than deference. The restaurant below carries the same intelligence — bentwood cafe chairs and white-clothed round tables sharing the room with striking pendant light fixtures assembled from clusters of articulated black workshop lamps, the whole space washed in light through the building's original tall arched windows. Across the hotel's 55 rooms, the palette stays disciplined: slate, oat, and white, with original moulded ceilings doing the decorative work that lesser conversions would crowd out with pattern and colour.

No travel notes provided yet.

No description provided yet.