Hotel Imperial

Room 506, Hotel Imperial, Vienna; 43-1-501100; www.luxurycollection.com/imperial. There are 138 rooms; doubles range from $700 to $860; Room 506, an executive junior suite, is $1,575.

"The streets of Vienna," wrote the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus, "are paved with culture." He wasn't kidding. Directly outside your recently redone fifth-floor suite is the Musikverein, the famed 1863 Greek Renaissance concert hall. Just beyond is the ornate 1715 Karlskirche, with its Baroque dome and its two shafts modeled after Trajan's Column. The history of your neo-Renaissance hotel is no less august. Built in the 1860s as the palace of the Duke of Württemberg, it was converted into a hotel at the time of the 1873 World's Fair. Except for stints as the German Foreign Ministry offices during World War II and the Russian headquarters during the Allied occupation, it has been one of Vienna's premier hotels ever since, welcoming official state visitors from Prince Otto von Bismarck to Queen Elizabeth, as well as a great number of Condé Nast Traveler readers: Indeed, the Imperial ranks twelfth among European hotels in this year's Readers' Choice Awards.