Call it EXCELLENCE
The Particularly Special
The Park Hyatt Vienna and KATE & KON have shared a special partnership from the very beginning, and it has been ten years. One could write the usual platitudes about it. But that would not be special
Florian, Katharina & Konstantin Wolf, KATE & KON
“What belongs together, will grow together.”
Willy Brandt
Ten years, indeed. Ten years already. Ten years that Park Hyatt has been located at Am Hof in Vienna. By “Hof,” it does not mean the “aristocratic court” that one can find everywhere in Vienna if one looks, but “Am Hof ” as a special address between the worlds of the first district. The “Am Hof ” square, where the proletarian-dominated first fire station of Vienna has its headquarters, is the link between the highly touristic promenades of Kohlmarkt and Graben and the part of the city known as the Stock Exchange district, which hardly any tourists wander into. If guests of the Park Hyatt head straight out of the hotel and then keep a bit to the left, they discover an old Vienna, such as the Mölker Bastei, where apparently many paths pass by – so deserted is this stage. This is just one of the special features of this special hotel.
Another special thing is that old Viennese people still remember the magnificent building of the Park Hyatt as a bank, the “old Länderbank,” one of Vienna’s reputable old banks, which had nothing to say in the new era of global financial flows. Yet this old respectability, which this building always exuded: this old respectability has remained. And that is one of the reasons why we at KATE & KON always find the right air to breathe here. In this venerable building, which for ten years now has been managed and enlivened by people who feel exactlywhat we feel in this building. It is not necessarily spiritual to say that these walls are thick enough to energetically repel everything banal and bothersome from the outside world. Park Hyatt Vienna and KATE & KON, and this is now a sentence as one often reads in such clichéd articles, share a ten-year partnership that can also be called friendship in the canon of values – although friendships in professional life are few and far between; between us, however, they are thick.
The Bolliparadise Champagne Bollinger Range
Barbara Göttling, General Manager Park Hyatt Vienna & Konstantin Wolf,
KATE & KON
Why is this so? How can one establish and furnish something that defies the usual, that undermines the conventional, that highlights the special, that makes the special truly special? The answer is actually simple: follow the excellent, acknowledge your inclination towards excellence, and seek out people who are searching for the same as you. Sought! Found!
We deal in wines and spices that are not only reputedly excellent but “excellent by nature.” And Park Hyatt Vienna seeks and understands our pursuit and discovery of excellence. With our discovery, the search for the refined and discerning people at Park Hyatt also comes to an end. Or, to quote Willy Brandt: “What belongs together, will grow together.”
And there is Bollinger. Our favorite champagne house, which we exclusively import for Austria. Park Hyatt Vienna and KATE & KON have built a world with and around Bollinger; a world that casts all creations of this special champagne winery in a different, new, and brilliantly illuminating special light. Champagne Bollinger, Park Hyatt Vienna, and us: first there was the Bollibox, a kind of foldable champagne bar, a fragile but joyously joyful installation, to the Bolligarden, which still exists today as Bolliparadise, an exhibition of the exquisite and exclusive from Bollinger, Park Hyatt Vienna, and KATE & KON that is not bound to the temporary.
Ten years, indeed. Ten years of Park Hyatt Vienna. Ten years of partnership. Ten years of corporate friendship. Ten years that, both politically and socially, have not been as light as the decades before always were. We lived together through a pandemic. And for two years, we have been living in a world that has become geopolitically fragile. But precisely then, exactly when it also depends on the excellence in thinking about the present and the future: exactly then does real
partnership mean the true recognition of why we are partners. Ad multos annos, Park Hyatt Vienna. And may there be more than just ten.
KATE & KON
kateandkon.com