< CZECH REPUBLIC | KARLOVY VARY: Grandhotel Pupp

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The first of Grandhotel Pupp buildings was the so-called Saxony Hall, which was built by the order of the then Lord Mayor Deiml in 1701. In doing so, the Mayor of Deiml laid out the base outline for the later hotel constructions.

At the time when the glory of the Saxony Hall began to rise, another Lord Mayor Mr Andreas Becher began to govern the Carlsbad town hall. He also owned a piece of in the floodplain at the river bend and he wanted to have his own so called “Lusthaus“. That is why he built it at a right angle to the Saxony Hall, approximately in the place of the current Mirror Hall and the Grandrestaurant Pupp. Right from the beginning they began to call it the Czech Hall, separating it from the Deiml Hall.

In the year 1760 a native of Veltrusy Jan Jirí Pop came to Carlsbad, who previously worked as a confectioner to Count Rudolf Chotek. Here, he took a job with the local confectioner Mitterbach. In 1775, he marries Mitterbach’s daughter Františka who bought one third of the Czech Hall from the widow of Mayor Becher. In the following year, Františka bought the second third and in 1776, her husband, who by this time already called himself "Johann Georg Pupp", bought the last third. In the same year, he also started his own business.

Throughout the 19th century, the business grew significantly and in 1890, the Pupp family, now represented by the brothers Anthony, Julius and Heinrich, achieved the ownership of the original Saxony Hall. In this year the family also formed a joint stock company. Six years later the business is handed over to the Viennese architects Fellner and Helmer in order to transform the “Etablissement Pupp”. The collection of individual buildings was eventually, in 1907, incorporated in neo-baroque “Grandhotel Pupp”.

Years 1922-23 were the climax of construction and modernization of the entire hotel. Every room has its own bathroom with warm and cold water. Yet the biggest achievement was before the Second World War, when the Pupp family was finally able to buy the last of the required buildings, the so-called House of God’s Eye - today Café Pupp.

In 1951, the hotel was renamed to "Grandhotel Moscow", but in year 1989 returned back to its tradition and its original name Grandhotel Pupp.

Grandhotel Pupp's Golden book include names of: Johann Sebastian Bach, Marie Therese, Giacomo Casanova, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Ludwig van Beethoven, Napoléon Louis Bonaparte, Niccolo Paganini, Adam Mickiewicz, Fryderyk Chopin, Antonín Dvořák, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Claudia Cardinale, Franco Nero, Juan Carlos I., Robert De Niro, Gina Lollobrigida, Michael York, Alan Alda, Gregory Peck, Julia Ormond, Michael Douglas, Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Redford, Sharon Stone, Daniel Craig, Renée Zellweger, Antonio Banderas, Susan Sarandon, Helen Mirren, John Travolta and others.

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