Palais Landau

The Palais Landau stands in the heart of Vienna’s Innere Stadt, a five-storey corner building on Elisabethstraße. Carl Schumann designed it in 1869–70 in the strict historicist style of New Viennese Renaissance. Its rounded corner carries a shallow dome that catches the light at all hours. Between 1918 and 1932 Alma Mahler-Werfel lived here with her second husband, the writer Franz Werfel, and a small plaque on the façade marks their home. The façade shows three horizontal bands: a rusticated ground floor, a decorated piano nobile, and plain upper levels. Windows on the piano nobile alternate between triangular and flat pediments, while the next floor mixes segmental and straight lintels. Above, a projecting cornice on carved brackets crowns the building with a row of dentils. The rounded corner and rhythmic window shapes give the street a quiet elegance. Inside, little remains of the original layout, yet the exterior still speaks of 19th-century Vienna’s architectural ambitions.