JW Marriott to open in Kraków in 2027 with 120 rooms and suites

JW Marriott will open its first hotel in Poland in 2027, taking over a 1925 Kraków building that once housed PKO Bank. The property will carry 120 rooms and suites, along with two restaurants, a piano bar in the rotunda and a basement spa with a swimming pool.

Ownership rests with JW Construction, a Polish property and hospitality group with more than 30 years of operation. The adaptive reuse of the landmark was led by URBA Architects, while Suited Interior Design has been appointed to reimagine the interior as a luxury hotel.

The design team will keep the bank's original vault and cashier hall, and will reveal a four-storey dome crowned by a cupola inspired by the Roman Pantheon. Many of the guestrooms will look out over St. Mary's Basilica, one of the city's defining landmarks.

Suited Interior Design took its concept from the paradox that faced the building's first architect, Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz. A classically trained preservationist watching modernism rise, he answered the tension with a building where modernist and classical elements stand side by side.

That duality returns in the guestrooms. Panel mouldings have been elongated to stress the lofty ceilings, and modernist timber detailing is worked into the classical frame. Bespoke furnishings follow the same line, putting clean modernist shapes against classical forms.

Among the 120 units are two-storey suites with spiral staircases and what the developer calls Mindfulness Suites, built to encourage rest and reflection. At 95 square metres, these suites offer full-height marble bathroom walls, free-standing baths and vanity units facing city views.

The most exclusive rooms are within the cupola itself. Beneath it, at the heart of the hotel, a new bar takes its proportions from the Pantheon and becomes the property's dramatic focal point, pulling the eye up through the soaring interior.

Echoes of the Kraków Workshops and the Young Poland Movement are reinterpreted through contemporary craft, colour and materials. References to 'white gold', the salt that once drove Kraków's prosperity, are expressed in the spa.

The building did double duty as a workplace and a home for its employees, which left it with wood-panelled offices and ornate boardrooms with decorative ceilings. The former cashier hall keeps its encaustic tile flooring, once typical of industrial settings, as part of the historic fabric.

Cashier stations that once anchored the bank's daily work are being remade as a lounge, keeping the building's story while giving it a new use. The executive lounge is in the historic section, among original timber panelling, as a quieter counterpoint to the hotel's public rooms.

A first for the brand in Poland

This is the brand's first address in Poland, and it lands as JW Marriott broadens its portfolio in Europe and beyond. We covered the opening of its first all-inclusive, a 415-room resort in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, a sign of the marque stretching beyond its city-hotel roots.

The Kraków project shows the opposite direction: a compact 120-key conversion in a dense historic centre rather than a sprawling beach resort. Both moves point to a brand testing how far its name carries across different scales and settings.

JW Marriott is the luxury flag within Marriott International's portfolio, known for spa-led wellness programming. Our profile of Spa by JW in Edmonton records the brands clean, contemporary wellness work and its signature Resilience and Wellness Ritual, a routine designed to reset body and mood.

The Kraków spa, set in the basement with a swimming pool, gives the brand a chance to bring that Ritual to Central Europe. The salt references woven into the design tie the wellness offer directly to the city's own history.

Kraków is already a busy luxury market, with the Kempinski opening its Augustine Hotel in Prague's living monastery the same year. That puts two heritage conversions from rival flags on neighbouring Central European high streets in 2027, competing for the same traveller.

The Tivoli Avenida Liberdade in Lisbon followed a similar path when it remodelled its rooms, letting classical bones meet modern interiors. JW Marriott Kraków is picking up the same thread in a much smaller, more historic core.

No opening date beyond 2027 has been given, and no room rates have been published. The developer has described the finishes and the room mix in detail but has not said which restaurants will open or who will run them.

What is fixed is the shell: a four-storey dome, a vault and a cashier hall that survived a century of banking. When the first guests arrive. they will sleep above that history rather than alongside it.

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Sources

1. CPP-Luxury JW Marriott to open in Krakow, Poland (2027)

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