Grand Hotel du Boulevard. The early days of hotels in Bucharest

This paper aims to look into the emergence of hotels in the Romanian space, emergence fuelled by the desire to catch up with the Western trends. This programme is particularly noticeable in the capital city of Romania, in the late 19th century; certain buildings would also follow it into the next century and help strengthen the capital’s status socially, but also in the context of the utility it provided the city with.

For the subject of the present study - Grand Hotel du Boulevard (an edifice with an outstanding history and a significant impact on the city’s development)-, we aim to identify the context that led to emergence of this programme in Bucharest. The purpose of this article is to look into how it aligned with the trends and standards of the large cities of the 19th century, building on the function of its predecessor, the inn, and going through all stylistic and functional stages. We will further highlight how the hotel contributed, in close connection with other historically and culturally equally relevant hotels, to the articulation of a tourist background that could turn the city into an attractive destination, and defined its special status over the last two centuries.

Our conclusions are typical for the entire hotel movement, since the proposed edifice was treated as a high-end architectural and functional object both both during design and construction, as well as during its many rehabilitation and refurbishment phases. In the urban landscape that started to come into shape in the late 19th century, a particular attention went to the hotel’s functionality. The many facilities that had not been found earlier in Bucharest clearly marked the leap from an inn to a hotel. This approach, coupled with the stylistic dimension addressed to the last detail, indicates that Grand Hotel du Boulevard became a very first example of a new function in Bucharest.