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Home › Articles › International Travel › High Style

High Style

A Visit Through Vienna

By Jamie Moore

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If you're looking for tips on modest simplicity, avoid Vienna. This city's lavish palaces, museums and gardens ooze imperial flair. Each manicured shrub and every gilded door frame have been meticulously placed by careful hands. High style reigns supreme.

A bit pompous? Maybe. But if the grandeur could inspire compositions by Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss and Brahms (all of whom took up residence here), it's sure to inspire a few haute bourgeois ideas for your home and gardens.

Ringstrasse's Kaleidoscope
A stroll along the Ringstrasse, a tree-lined boulevard that circles Vienna's historic city center, reveals a kaleidoscope of architectural styles. Historicism flourished in the late 19th century – when the old city walls came down to make way for "The Ring," as the Viennese call it – and each building among the impressive array incorporated a style of some bygone era.

First, stop for a double shot of Italian Renaissance: genuine marble, ceiling murals and golden domes times two. The Ringstrasse's Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of Natural History were not only both built in the same style and adjacent to each other, they're identical twins. Stand in the garden between the two museums, and the mirror image becomes apparent.

Nearby, City Hall's bristled neo-Gothic spires loom high above The Ring. A series of ornately designed archways lines each level of the exterior. Inside, light slants through multicolored windows onto steep, majestic flights of stairs with wrought-iron railings.

Homes and apartments in and around the Ringstrasse are equally grand. "Many have wide and gorgeous staircases, high ceilings, wooden floors, long windows and double-winged doors with wooden frames," says Marion Kuzmany, freelance architect and excursion coordinator at Architekturzentrum Wien, Vienna's architectural center.

Garden-grown Formality
Outside, fountains and statues are the focal point around which several of the Ringstrasse's formal gardens are shaped. A red flowerbed perfectly groomed into a musical cleft lies in front of Mozart's statue in the Burggarten. The Volksgarten's pathways and flowerbeds bordered with mini hedges also form ornate patterns around monuments. Near the Johann Strauss statue in the Stadtpark is a clock whose giant arms are embedded among concentric circles of Begonia and Echeveria designs.

When choosing patterns for your own walkways, knot gardens and parterres, landscape architect and designer Tim Thoelecke recommends finding classic patterns illustrated in books or borrowing ideas from the site itself. "Perhaps there is an ornate door with a pattern in it or a window or the [opening] of one wall of a building that can be echoed or used as a model for a pattern," says Thoelecke, president of Chicago-based landscape design firm Garden Concepts Inc.

Inside the Imperial
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