Gresham Palace, Budapest

The seat of the former Gresham Insurance Company is among the most splendid palaces in Budapest, a masterpiece of Hungarian secession style. This palace, built to the plans of Zsigmond Quittner and József Vágó in 1907, has been refurbished as a luxury hotel. 

Click to the picture - panoramaphoto by Boros Sándor!

An international invitation to tender for the building put out in England was won by Zsigmond Quittner, a leading Hungarian historicist architect who had designed many other Budapest buildings. Based on his ideas, the office and housing complex was finished between 1905 and 1907. With its rich beauty and animated facade, it has the qualities of a sculptural work of art.

The architect's colleagues, the artists who dreamt up the rich sculptural ornaments, the stained glass windows, the mosaics, the wrought iron railings and the famous peacock-gate were all the most distinguished of the era. The square also gained its current crescent shape thanks to Quittner's conception; it stretches from the Academy (Akadémia) up to the Chain Bridge (Lánchíd).

One of the largest apartment buildings in the Budapest of its day it covered 12,000 square meter. Its three staircases opened from a glass-covered passage, and its unique tiles were made in the Zsolnay Ceramics Factory. Its shopping arcade is an architectural rarity as it is the oldest intact covered shopping street in Budapest.

A self-assured English gentleman has been watching the traffic from the facade of this Palace standing at the end of the span of the Chain Bridge for nearly a hundred years. Sir Thomas Gresham, who established the London stock market in 1566, is the eponym of the Gresham Insurance Company which was based in England and operated by his descendants.

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Budapest travel, Budapest sights, Budapest, Hungary sights