Harry’s neu Suite | The Austrian Actor who Moved In

The Hotel Altstadt Vienna's most loyal guest finally acquires a boutique suite of his own, and the quiet rituals of belonging are written into the walls.

"Whoever begins to bring his own furniture," Harald Krassnitzer is fond of saying, "has earned his own room." He laughs when he says it, but the line has acquired, over the years, a faintly autobiographical quality. For more than two decades, the Austrian actor has been returning to the hotel Altstadt Vienna in the Spittelberg whenever a film or television shoot brings him to the city, and somewhere along the way, between late suppers and a great many cups of tea, the hotel stopped being a hotel for him and quietly became, instead, where he lives when he is in town. He now has a suite of his own on the top floor: eighty-five square metres, a small kitchen, the run of the morning light. The brass plaque on the hotel suite’s door reads: Harry K Room, Suite No. 85.

This sort of thing happens at the hotel Altstadt Vienna rather more than it happens elsewhere. The Wiesenthal family, who run the place, have made a quiet tradition of naming rooms after the people who have shaped them. There are plaques for the architects and designers who have given the house its grain (Lilli Hollein, the Moretti studio, and so on), and plaques for the regulars who have grown into the rooms with the patient inevitability of ivy. Helga has one. So, now, does Harry K, with the small distinction that his suite was dedicated to him before a single piece of furniture had been chosen. The Wiesenthals simply handed him the keys and the architect Roland Nemetz and said, more or less, go on, then. It is the sort of vote of confidence that tells you everything about the relationship.

Krassnitzer, for his part, gave up behaving like a guest in any recognisable sense some time ago. He gives directions to strangers in the lobby. He knows the staff by name. He has been known to brew a pot of tea for a chambermaid with a head cold, and to press a Schutzengerl, a small Viennese guardian angel, into the apron pocket of a waitress on her last shift. None of this, as anyone who has ever worked in a hotel will tell you, is normal guest behaviour. The suite itself, designed by a man who has had twenty years to think about it, is exactingly particular. The sitting room is the bright half of the apartment, with all the vocabulary of grand-bourgeois Vienna: tall stucco ceilings, herringbone parquet, the soft sand-coloured light that makes the whole city look slightly more expensive than it is. The kitchenette, at Krassnitzer's insistence, has been relocated to the spot where that light falls most kindly, then concealed behind a walnut sliding door, the better not to disturb the room when it is being a room. In front of it sits a vintage Thonet table with Arne Jacobsen's Ant chairs from Fritz Hansen, a small but telling pairing of two countries that have always known what to do with bentwood.

Harald Krassnitzer in the suite that bears his name at Hotel Altstadt Vienna, designed with the architect Roland Nemetz | The Aficionados.

There is a pale leather sofa, a dark sideboard, a modest run of bookshelves, and at the centre a pair of Eileen Gray's height-adjustable glass tables from the 1920s, looking as ever as though they have just been wheeled in by a very elegant waiter. A Flos Parentesi lamp draws a fine vertical line of light through the air. The Cassina Wink chair, with its postmodern Mickey Mouse ears, sprawls in one corner, being charmingly ridiculous. Miniatures by Vesna Muhr appear throughout, like footnotes in a book one is rather enjoying.

The bedroom, by contrast, is the theatrical half. A deep red wall does most of the work; opulent, faintly Schnitzlerian, the sort of room in which one feels that an assignation may be either beginning or ending. Around it: a round leather armchair, an antique writing desk with drawers, a Thonet chair, an Oriental rug, and a tall headboard in dark violet, deeply buttoned in the Chesterfield manner so that one might sit up and read in some style. (Krassnitzer was, by all accounts, immovable on this last point.) Above the armchair hangs a painting by Xenia Hausner of a red-and-white cake on blue ground, ironic and very nearly surreal. In the lavatory, a cow by Dan Walker observes one's ablutions with bovine equanimity. In the corridor, an Arnold Schwarzenegger by Jonathan Monk, in case one had momentarily forgotten which country one was in. One lives here, as the press notes rather charmingly put it, in good company.

The truly telling details, though, are the things one cannot order from a furniture fair. A Manufactum Sprossenwand, a set of Swedish wall-bars, has been quietly absorbed into the architecture of the corridor; Krassnitzer brought it along for training. Beside it hangs, neatly framed, a small modern broadside: Lest mehr Marx, esst mehr Obst. Read more Marx, eat more fruit. The portable radio has moved in, too. The line Krassnitzer himself uses, when asked what it is like to come back, is that walking in feels less like checking into a hotel and more like coming home, with the agreeable addition of room service. It is a description that doubles, rather neatly, as a definition of what the Altstadt has been trying to do all along.

There is, in fairness, nothing very revolutionary about a hotel that wants its guests to feel at home. The phrase appears on every brochure in Europe, mostly in vain. What the Altstadt manages, in the Harry K Room as in the rest of the house, is the much harder version: making a guest feel sufficiently at home that he begins, by degrees, to leave his own things behind. A radio. A wall of bars. A reading light placed exactly so. A line about Marx and fruit. By the time the brass plaque goes on the door, it is almost a formality.

Otto Ernst Wiesenthal opened the Altstadt at Kirchengasse 41 in the Spittelberg in 1991, on the rather unfashionable principle that art in a hotel ought to live in the rooms rather than hang dutifully on the walls. Three decades on, the place has 62 rooms across five floors and well over 200 works by Warhol, Helnwein, Brigitte Kowanz, Niki de Saint Phalle, Prachensky, and Leibowitz, among many others. Each room has, by long tradition, been entrusted to a different architect, designer, artist, or actor to shape; Matteo Thun, AtılKutoğlu, Lena Hoschek, Tobias Moretti, and Adolf Krischanitz have all, in their time, taken up the invitation. Otto remains the presiding spirit; his daughters, Saskia and Lisa, increasingly carry the day-to-day. The Harry K Room is the latest in a long and particular tradition.

Dan Walker's cow, observing proceedings from the lavatory of the Harry K Room at Hotel Altstadt Vienna | The Aficionados.

A red leather armchair below Xenia Hausner's cake painting, in the bedroom of the Harry K Room at Hotel Altstadt Vienna | The Aficionados.