History of Embassy
Welcome to Hotel Embassy – please be our guests. It is certainly interesting to look back at the history of this unique building and take a brief glance against the current of time. What is the history of Embassy and the house in which it is located?
The basic floor plan of house No. 21 (Embassy) dates from around 1800. At that time, the house bore the name "Blaues Rössl – Blue Horse." The name was likely connected to the stables here. In a Karlovy Vary directory from 1835, the building is listed as a one-storey house with 6 windows on its façade and 14 stalls. Next door, where the museum now stands, were the municipal stables with 40 stalls.
The history of the house is closely linked with the long-established Karlovy Vary family of Pitroff. Its members held it for nearly 100 years. This family also produced the founder of the museum in Karlovy Vary, Anton Pitroff. In the second half of the 19th century, the owner of the house was Joseff Pitroff and his family; from 1898 to the mid-1930s, it was Josefína Pitroffová.
After 1850, the house was renamed from the "Blue Horse" to "Prince Reuss – Greiz – Fürst Reuss – Greiz," probably in honour of a visit by this prince. After 1935, the name changed to "Town of Greiz – Stadt Greiz." At that time the owners were Franz and Wilhelm Pitroff.
After the First World War, a delicatessen was established in house No. 21 on Nová Louka. Shortly after 1920, an employee named Evald Čermák purchased it from his late employer's widow, including the entire building. In 1938, Evald Čermák decided to radically convert the delicatessen into a stylish wine bar. In order to gain maximum space for the wine bar, he included the area of an unused horse stable in the courtyard behind the building in his renovation plans. Because Čermák aspired to establish the best wine bar in Karlovy Vary, he commissioned the architectural plans from the expert Dr. Ing. Mewes. The architect quickly delivered a design that the delicatessen owner and wine bar operator accepted with enthusiasm. The wine bar was conceived by Dr. Ing. Mewes in the spirit of Romanticism and was intended to enchant visitors with myths and legends from an exotic past. He also proposed the name of the wine bar: "Zum Tazzelwurm," which refers to a legendary poisonous lizard from Alpine folklore. The wine bar was spatially arranged into four interconnected halls, each with its own theme and corresponding furnishings. It is fortunate that the furnishings of the wine bar have survived almost in their original form, more than 50 years after their creation.
The house with today's Embassy wine bar has hosted a number of interesting personalities. Perhaps the most remarkable was the famous Australian businessman Charles Rasp in 1901 – the discoverer of silver deposits at Broken Hill and the founder of the mining town of the same name in New South Wales. Even today, Hotel Embassy hosts many prominent personalities from around the world, including Michael Douglas, John Malkovich, Miloš Forman, and others.