Brand new W hotel opens in former Ballet Institute in Budapest

The lights in the Drechsler Palace had been off and its windows boarded up for over a decade. Despite being a landmark built by Ödön Lechner and Gyula Pártos in the 1880s, occupying prime real estate on Budapest’s most elegant boulevard, Andrássy Avenue–a UNESCO World Heritage Site in its own right–facing the Hungarian National Opera, the building that once housed the former Ballet Institute closed its doors in the early 2000s, only for them to reopen again in 2023.