Vienna is not a city that comes to you. You have to go to it. Arrive on its terms, at its pace, with your eyes open and your preconceptions somewhere safely in your luggage, preferably at the bottom.
I have been to places that overwhelm you with beauty. Vienna does something quieter and more powerful than that. It asks you to look more carefully. It teaches you that restraint is not the absence of opulence — it is opulence with precision. Every palace, every church, every unremarkable doorway in this city has been considered. The lock, the light switch, the door hinge, the ceiling fresco three floors above where anyone might reasonably think to look. Vienna has spent centuries perfecting the art of devotion, and as a designer, being inside that devotion changed the way I work.
I arrived here not to collect inspiration but to compose it. To know what I was searching for, and equally, to know what to leave behind. The collection that came from this city — Elsewhere Palace — was born from that shift. What follows is my guide to the city that inspired it: Vienna.
Coburgbastei 4, 1010 Wien
Built on the ancient fortifications of the city, Palais Coburg has lived many lives. What it is now — a quietly extraordinary jewel-box luxury hotel that does not announce itself from the outside — feels like its truest expression.
I walked into the Yellow Salon and time stopped. That gilded cream and gold-leaf patterning, the crystal chandeliers hanging with quiet architectural confidence — it was a room that understood exactly how to shape light. The Blue and Green Salons carry the same quality: opulence, without noise. The Mirrored Hall, where reflections compound into reflections and the space seems to multiply endlessly, is one of the more arresting rooms I have ever stood inside.
The Cityscape Room's mosaic stopped me for a different reason. A designer's reason: sheer ancient, tessellated precision. The way small pieces of stone build into something vast and coherent, creating beauty through accumulation rather than grand gesture. It became a visual reference I kept returning to throughout the process of making Elsewhere Palace.
Vienna will ask more of you than any single hotel. But as a base, Palais Coburg allows you to inhabit exactly the kind of interior perspective that makes this city worth studying.
Schönbrunn Palace & The Bergl Rooms
Schönbrunner Schloßstraße 47, 1130 Wien
I had the Bergl Rooms on my Pinterest board for years before I ever set foot inside them. Some places earn your anticipation and then double it. These rooms are those places.
The Bergl Rooms aren't part of the standard palace tour, which means most visitors to Schönbrunn never find them. Book a private guide and make them the reason you visit. Trust me, you won’t be sorry. Commissioned in the 18th century by Empress Maria Theresa, who found the upper floors of the palace impossibly warm in summer, they were painted floor to ceiling by the court artist Johann Bergl in trompe l'oeil landscapes — imagined gardens, impossible skies, exotic birds settled in painted arches, scenes designed to convince you that the walls have simply ceased to exist.
This is one of the more radical design ideas I have ever encountered: an entire room that refuses to accept its own boundaries. Walls that (as I came to think of it) couldn't bear to stay blank. It became the organising idea behind some of the most important prints in the Elsewhere Palace collection: Art For The Empress and Midsummer Masterpiece were inspired and painted directly from these rooms, capturing their grand arches, lace detailing and that suspended, romantic atmosphere. Sisi Society followed the same lineage, drawn from the Bergl Rooms housed within the Sisi Museum at Hofburg Palace.
Schönbrunn rewards more than one visit. Return on a separate day for the Porcelain Rooms — deep cobalt and crisp white, every surface decorated with hand-painted panels and ornamental medallions — which gave us Porcelain Parlour and Chinoiserie Child. And do not leave without visiting the Schönbrunn Zoo, the oldest still operating zoo in the world. The Breakfast Room, with its hand-painted fresco ceilings and gilded walls, where animals appear framed within baroque architectural borders, became the foundation for the prints Wanderlust Empire and Palace Zoology.
Schönbrunn alone handed us more than any other location on the entire trip. I suggest you plan accordingly.
Vienna's historic centre holds layers of Habsburg ambition accumulated across 600 years. You could spend your entire time within walking distance of the Hofburg and still not reach the bottom of it.
Hofburg Palace, Imperial Apartments & Sisi Museum
Michaelerplatz, 1010 Wien
The Hofburg was the Habsburg seat for six centuries, and it carries that weight in every corridor. The Imperial Apartments feel lived-in rather than museum-ified — these were people's rooms, and they still feel like it. The Sisi Museum — dedicated to the private life of Empress Elisabeth, affectionately known as Sisi — is genuinely moving. A woman who loved to travel and found the walls of the empire constraining, she was known for her rebellious streak and extraordinary costumes. You find kindred spirits in the strangest places.
Wagenburg Museum at Schönbrunn Palace, 1130 Wien
Do not underestimate this one. The Imperial Carriage Museum sits just footsteps from Schönbrunn and holds an extraordinary collection of state carriages and royal vehicles — black lacquered bodies, gilded ornament, horse harness creations of almost hallucinatory intricacy and gold detailing. The quality of the craft is awe-inspiring: the dark opulence, the costume detailing, the layering of gilded decorative work against inky black surrounds. Night Garden — one of my favourite prints from the collection — was born in this building. And the deep, regal foundations of Call Me A Carriage and Cloaked In Baroque were drawn from the same well: imperial grandeur, the theatre of evening, ornamentation placed exactly where it belongs, and nowhere else.
Vienna holds more great art per square metre than almost anywhere else on earth. As a designer, I did not move through these galleries as a passive admirer. I moved through them professionally — looking at composition, at how a figure sits within a pattern, at what scale does to emotion, at where the eye is led and why.
The Albertina
Albertinaplatz 1, 1010 Wien
The largest Habsburg residential palace now houses one of the world's most significant collections: 65,000 drawings, almost a million old master prints. Klimt, Rubens, Picasso, Cézanne, Dürer, plus permanent masterworks including Monet, Degas and Renoir. I find Klimt endlessly instructive as a creative— the way he refuses to rank pattern and figure, holding them in equal visual tension, neither one decorating the other. That lesson arrives in his work, whether you're looking for it or not.
Albertinaplatz/Maysedergasse, 1010 Wien
Built in 1891 to house the Habsburg royal collection, the Fine Arts Museum's Renaissance Revival architecture is itself worth the visit. The Chamber of Art and Wonders holds works from the medieval period through the Baroque — Raphael, Vermeer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Dürer, Titian. Time spent in these galleries shaped some of the season’s most romantic prints directly: Dandelion Skies, Chamber of Blooms and Wildflower Wunderland drew inspiration from the House of Habsburg collections, blending Renaissance Revival architecture with embroidery, lace and porcelain detailing into richly layered, romantic wearable art.
The Belvedere Palace
Prinz-Eugen-Straße 27, 1030 Wien
A UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the most beautiful Baroque palace complexes in Europe. The Upper Belvedere houses twenty-four works by Klimt — including The Kiss in permanent residence — alongside major works by Monet, Van Gogh and Rodin. The formal French gardens with their clipped hedges and reflecting pools are as considered as anything inside. Arrive early in the morning or late in the evening, before (or after) the crowds. Spend longer than you think you have.
Burgring 7, 1010 Wien
This was the visit that surprised me most. Opened in 1889 as the first true museum of evolution, the Natural History Museum houses some twenty million objects — gemstones, minerals, insects, pterodactyls, an extraordinary collection of taxidermied specimens. I took photograph after photograph of the butterfly specimens: their scale, their architectural symmetry, the almost graphic nature of their wing markings. The obsession with amplifying that scale and playing with form gave us Millamorphosis and Butterfly Bohemia — oversized butterfly motifs reimagined through vivid colour and expressive movement, blended with our signature CAMILLA signature animal print. There is something profound about a museum that holds what is gone alongside what remains threatened. It gives everything on display a kind of gravity that’s far from contrived.
The Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Wien
Klimt's Beethoven Frieze lives in the basement of this building, and it is one of the greatest things you can see in Vienna. The Secession movement — ‘to every age its art, to every art its freedom’ — created an architecture and a design philosophy that I find deeply aligned with how I approach print: organic detailing, ornament as meaning rather than decoration, freedom as formal discipline. The extraordinary Majolica House nearby, with its hand-painted ceramic façade, and the architectural medallion detailing throughout the district informed The Secession Sessions print equally.
Josefsplatz 1, 1015 Wien
Europe's largest Baroque library, housing over 200,000 historic books. The Grand Hall, with its 128 bookshelves, cabinets built from floor to frescoed ceiling and bountiful books bound in red, blue and yellow Morocco leather, is one of the most beautiful rooms in the world. I say this without qualification.
Markets & Hidden Treasures
The markets of Vienna are where the city's more intimate life unfolds. Where the layers of history are for sale, or at least for handling, and where you find the things that you absolutely weren't looking for... and yet somehow cannot live without.
Am Hof Art & Antiques Market
Am Hof, 1010 Wien
Open Friday–Saturday, 10am–6pm, March to November
This quiet square across from the Am Hof Church is more than it looks from the outside. Unassuming at first glance, the market unfolds into an array of antiques, paintings, porcelain and objects that hold their stories without explaining them.
Mariedlgasse, Wien
Flohmarkt Wienerberg: Wienerbergstraße 27a, 1100 Wien
Walking Vienna is an education in proportion. The grand Ringstrasse boulevard, the domed palaces, the Baroque churches with their elaborate façades — this city thinks in silhouette, and that thinking stretches as far as the eye can see.
St Anne's Church
Annagasse 3B, 1010 Wien
Bankgasse 9, 1010 Wien
Opernring 2, 1010 Wien
Griechenbeisl
Fleischmarkt 11, 1010 Wien
Stephansplatz 12-4, 1010 Wien
Vienna is not a city you complete. It is a city you begin, and hope to one day return to.
I came here with a new design language in mind — something more composed, more architectural, more attuned to what happens when opulence and restraint are held in the same hand. What I found was a city that had been answering those questions for four centuries and had arrived at some very beautiful conclusions.
Elsewhere Palace was born here. Its name, its spirit — the stillness inside the richness, the ornament balanced by air, the confidence that comes from knowing what to leave out — it all unfolds exquisitely within these rooms, these streets, these extraordinary interiors that Vienna keeps, quietly, only for those who are willing to look.
Auf Wiedersehen, Wien. Until next time.
