Design hotels in Vinohrady: our favourites

Vinohrady is Prague's answer to the question of what happens when a city preserves its fin-de-siècle apartment architecture while allowing the neighbourhood to evolve into something genuinely contemporary. The result is leafy boulevards of Art Nouveau buildings containing independent coffee shops, natural wine bars and small hotels that have figured out how to be design-conscious without being aggressively expensive.

The neighbourhood's boutique hotel scene is concentrated around Náměstí Míru (Peace Square) and the streets radiating south and east from it. Properties here tend to occupy converted residential buildings rather than purpose-built hotel structures, which creates room configurations that are more interesting and often more comfortable than the standard hotel floor plan — and pricing that reflects the location rather than the Old Town premium.

What Vinohrady offers that the Old Town cannot is a sense of daily life proceeding alongside the tourist experience. The farmers' market on Náměstí Jiřího z Poděbrad on weekends is genuinely local; the restaurants on Mánesova and Blanická serve a clientele that includes residents rather than exclusively visitors; the tram lines connect you to the centre in ten minutes without the crowds of Wenceslas Square.

For first-time visitors nervous about being "too far from the sights," the practical answer is that Vinohrady is closer to the National Museum and the top of Wenceslas Square than many Old Town hotels are to the Charles Bridge. The psychological distance is larger than the geographical one.