Grande dame of the Danube

THE best place to stay in Budapest is also one of the most historic.

View of the Four Seasons Gresham Palace Hotel Budapest and St Stephen's Basilica from across the River Danube in Budapest, Hungary.

WHAT a cosy bower in which to nest midway through a European tour. After the porter arranges my bags, he joins me by the tall windows in my room framing a sunny view of the Danube. "Beautiful," I exclaim. "Thank you," he replies, as if the scene is all of his own doing. It is a charming response, full of quiet pride.

The afternoon is young and there's time for a little rest after I have unpacked. But first I need a good long bath. I am in the right place; the double-doored bathroom is more like a ballroom, with green and gold marble by the mile, stacks of verbena-scented L'Occitane toiletries and a Hollywood starlet tub.

Four Seasons Gresham Palace surely has the best location of any hotel in Budapest. It's on the Pest side -- the commercial hub, with banks, big shops and apartment buildings -- and from its river-facing rooms there's a brilliant view of water traffic, the oldest stone bridge on the Danube and, beyond, the hills of Buda with their old-money villas, churches and museums.

Danube Promenade is a riverside walk on the hotel's doorstep with views of three bridges. It's about a 10-minute walk to the neo-gothic Parliament Building, shopping precincts and St Stephen's Basilica. It's five minutes up Castle Hill by funicular on the Buda side (cross the Chain Bridge in front of the hotel) to the green-domed Royal Palace, galleries and the atmospheric Cafe Ruszwurm, a coffee house and confectioner since 1827. (Try the apricot or cherry jam-filled biscuits, poppyseed and cream cheese strudels and rich walnut Esterhazy cake layered with cream and topped with fondant; then return to the Four Seasons for a good lie down.)

Back to base camp, and the original hotel building was opened by the London-based Gresham Life Assurance Company in 1906 in ornamented art nouveau style as its European headquarters with accommodation attached for visiting high-ups.

In its heyday, when Budapest was routinely hailed as the Paris of central Europe, Gresham Palace was the Hungarian capital's grandest venue, with a high-ceilinged restaurant, lavish apartments, an avant-garde cabaret venue and an elegant glass-roofed T-shaped shopping arcade.

The palace was bombed during the siege of Budapest in 1944 and saw service as a base for British and US military personnel. Archival notes indicate that "chandeliers were replaced with lightbulbs and leaded-glass windows gradually disappeared".

Before the Four Seasons group opened this landmark pile as a five-star hotel in June 2004, it was a frayed, state-owned apartment building with a warren of dim corridors and small units; precious Zsolnay ceramic tiles regularly crumbled and fell off the facade.

After a two-year, $US110 million restoration involving legions of master craftspeople, the original ironwork gates with their swirling peacock motifs are all polished and gleaming black, providing a grand entrance to a vestibule, beyond which stretch the lobby topped with a glass cupola and ground-floor public areas reached via the so-called Peacock Passage. The Zsolnay mosaics and tiles have been reconditioned, the Miksa Roth-designed stained glass windows twinkle merrily and almost every last historic detail is present and correct.

There are 179 guestrooms, including 14 suites (two of which are in the domed towers); some accommodation comes with a balcony, and all rooms have a muted colour scheme of bronze and gold and touches of aubergine. Carpet patterns, fabrics and most furniture items are contemporary interpretations of the curved art nouveau and deco styles. The penthouse level features a health club, lap pool, steamrooms and spa with seven treatment rooms; Gresham Cafe does a lovely afternoon tea with wicked cakes (Budapest has no truck with dieters); there's even a concierge toy service for junior guests (Lego, games, colouring books).

A bust of Thomas Gresham, founder of the London Stock Exchange, looks out over the Danube from a lofty plinth. It's not financiers and titled personages who glide through those gates these days, just discerning travellers, many with a discreet Four Seasons carry bag of towel and shampoo under their wing as they head to the Szechenyi baths.

Susan Kurosawa was a guest of Four Seasons Gresham Palace.

Checklist
Four Seasons Gresham Palace, 1051 Budapest, Hungary. Phone [phone]; www.fourseasons.com. From about E260 ($388) a night for a double room with breakfast; look for extra-night promotions, such as stay four and pay for three. For bedtime reading, T&I recommends Paprika Paradise: Travels in the Land of My Almost Birth by The Australian's James Jeffrey.