#springflower
There are places in this world that feel, from the very first moment you step through their doors, as though they have been waiting for you. Altus Palace is one of them.
We arrived on a grey Tuesday evening, our luggage considerably heavier than when we'd left home, our spirits pleasantly buoyed by the journey through Wrocław's cobbled streets. And then the hotel doors opened.
The lobby stopped us both cold.
It was the kind of entrance that renders the outside world instantly forgettable — a grand staircase curling upward like a sentence building toward its finest word, Carrara marble columns catching the light, ornate stucco scrollwork that some craftsman had laboured over a century ago and which still, stubbornly, magnificently, refused to be merely decorative. The air smelled faintly of something warm and expensive. We stood together for a moment, simply looking.
The staff greeted us as though our arrival was the best thing that had happened to them all week. One rather suspects they greet everyone this way, but they are so extraordinarily convincing about it that it scarcely matters.
Our room was spacious in the way that good rooms always are — not merely large, but GENEROUS, as though the walls themselves understood the value of breathing space. The ceilings were high, the bed dressed in linens of the sort that make you wonder, briefly, what you have been doing with your life up until this point. There was a pillow spray on the bedside table — lavender, I think — and a wine fridge in the corner that my wife regarded with the reverent expression she normally reserves for very old bookshops (we don't drink alcohol but she loves her drinks COLD! Hence the amusement for the fridge)
Breakfast, taken each morning in no particular hurry, was a proper affair. Warm things were warm, cold things were cold, and there were freshly made dishes one could order in addition to the buffet, which itself operated on the sound philosophical principle that abundance, done correctly, is a form of kindness.
We spent our days wandering Wrocław — the Market Square with its improbable beauty, the gnomes tucked into cobblestones, the bridges draped in golden light — and returned each evening to heated bathroom floors and towels warm enough to constitute their own category of luxury. On one particularly cold afternoon, we discovered the spa. We did not leave for two hours. My wife, who had previously claimed she did not do saunas, emerged looking considerably more philosophical about most things.
The location, one should note, is precisely right. Ten minutes on foot and one is standing before the Town Hall. Fifteen and one has crossed into another century entirely. The trams pass occasionally — a gentle reminder that the world outside continues — but they did not trouble our sleep.
If Altus Palace has a flaw, we did not find it, though we were not, in truth, looking very hard. We checked out on a Sunday morning with the particular reluctance of people who have been, for a few days, somewhere better than ordinary life. My wife, who is not given to sentiment, paused at the door and looked back at the lobby.
"We're coming back," she said.
We are.
6°
