Flora Hotel building

Palác Flora on Prague's Vinohrady is a multi-purpose building that was created in the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century. On the corner of Orlická and Vinohradská streets, it housed a hotel, cinema, café and wine bar. It was designed by architect Alois Krofta, who was also its owner at the time it opened.

The building is one of the significant examples of interwar architecture. It was conceived monumentally and was built in two stages, in nineteen twenty-six and nineteen thirty-five. The distinctive feature is the rounded corners. Krofta combined motifs of the arch style and art deco with classical elements here.

The biggest attraction was the cinema. It opened on the first of March nineteen twenty-eight and at that time it was not only the largest cinema in Prague, which had eighty of them, but in the whole of Czechoslovakia. According to a contemporary report, it held over twelve hundred spectators. The auditorium measuring twenty-four point three by fourteen point seven meters was located in the basement of the palace and was decorated in rococo style. It had an orchestra pit, a balcony, cloakrooms, a smoking room and a buffet. The entrance is still decorated with marble statues of a man and woman in larger than life size, which are unrolling a film reel. Their author is sculptor Emanuel Kodet. From May nineteen thirty-one, sound films were shown here. After nineteen forty-eight, when another Prague cinema called Bystrica was closed, Flora took its name. It kept it until nineteen fifty-seven, when it returned to its original name.

Hotel Flora offered three hundred rooms and garages. The café on the first floor held dance evenings and evenings with entertainment. The wine bar had an entrance from Vinohradská Street and in the sixties was renovated under the name U bzenecké lipky.

The building served its purpose even after nationalization in nineteen forty-eight. In nineteen ninety it was closed and over five years of restitution disputes it fell into disrepair. In nineteen ninety-five, descendants of architect Krofta got it back and three years later they sold it in a devastated state to the General Health Insurance Company. The company paid one hundred fifty million crowns for the building and invested another two hundred forty-one and a half million into its reconstruction under the supervision of heritage conservators. The former cinema auditorium first transformed into a hall for public contact, today it is used only occasionally. The chandelier in the ceiling was replaced by a glazed dome which brings daylight into the hall.

Palác Flora has been protected as a cultural monument since the twenty-first of October two thousand and three.