“Take as many books up to your room as you can carry,” Silke Seemann encourages the newcomers. But which? 12,000 works are distributed in their hotel. In the beginning, the guests are often very excited when they are looking for the right book, says Seemann: “But that subsides because it’s quickly recognized that you can’t read through all of our works anyway.”
Seemann markets the reading hotel that opened above Bad Goisern on Lake Hallstatt in Austria last July as “a house like a bookshop where you can sleep”. The library in the stairwell is richly stocked over four floors from the basement to the roof. Seating niches with a velvety soft lining were built into the shelves, which are available to anyone who can no longer make it into their own room because they are reading all the freshly published novels, travel books and guidebooks.
In the library, the reading rooms and in the dining room, the books find their own order, often helped by guests rearranging them. In the four suites and 16 hotel rooms, however, the latest range from a publisher is available. These are in one room, for example, the romance novels from Munich-based Goldmann Verlag, known for their erotic bestseller “Fifty Shades of Grey”. In another, Kailash’s self-help publications. And another one only houses art books from the small Swiss edition Clandestin. In order to implement her hotel idea, Silke Seemann had to work out cooperation agreements with 20 publishers. “The world’s first cross-industry innovation project between the hotel industry and the publishing industry” is what the doctor of economics calls this heartfelt project.
The chairs developed by orthopedic surgeons look like gynecologist furniture, but supposedly protect the lumbar spine.
(Photo: Julian Mathieu)
Your reading hotel is located at the end of a winding road, in a secluded location at around 1000 meters on the Predigtstuhl, in the middle of the Northern Limestone Alps. Around 500 meters below is the Upper Austrian climatic health resort of Bad Goisern, which you can look down on as well as Lake Hallstatt, with the Dachstein Glacier rising up behind it. A reading hotel with a picture-perfect panorama, in the midst of a densely wooded network of hiking trails, in winter cross-country ski runs and snowshoe trails.
Silke Seemann developed the Plug&Play reading bed with Upper Austrian designer Gregor Wöckl for those who no longer want or can read themselves. It can be connected to the mobile phone, speakers are located in the upholstered side wall of the bed. You can roll it across the room, as can the desk and the stool that goes with it – it’s important to her that everyone can set up their room the way they like it, says the economist.
And in general, the native of Schleswig-Holstein has come up with quite a few ideas: A guest kitchen has been set up in the dining room so that you can try out the recipes from the cookbooks that are stacked on the dining tables. Rechargeable LED lamps can be easily transported to the room or to freshly made reading corners for optimal reading light. And in the reading room there are chairs developed by orthopaedists that look like gynecologist furniture but are designed to protect the lumbar spine. When you read, your legs rest on padded calf supports, and the backrest gently presses on the lumbar region. “The brain is refreshed,” says Seemann.
The entrepreneur does without a wellness area. From Bad Goisern, however, you can quickly reach the thermal baths in Bad Ischl by train. Those who stay in the reading hotel can also use the private garden with lake access in Hallstatt, which is just under thirty minutes away by car and belongs to one of the holiday apartments that Seemann also runs.
Plenty of space – inside and out: the reading hotel.
(Photo: Nicola Radacher)
Small Hallstatt is bustling, and international guests are also back. At the sermon chair, however, there is only silence and books. This environment is also ideal for authors, says Seemann: the seclusion, a good fiber optic connection and the electrically height-adjustable desks. The 26-year-old author Roshan Affolter lived in such a room suitable for working. She was born in Bad Ischl, but grew up in Afghanistan, Mozambique, Sudan, South Africa and the Czech Republic – her parents work for the United Nations. The reading hotel, she says, is something special: “If you need space inside or outside, then this is the ideal place.”
She spent a month in the reading hotel to write a screenplay. Of course, as a young artist, you often struggle with self-doubt, she admits. But her father, who was already a guest at the reading hotel, found a book here: Goethe’s worst poems. “I looked through it – the poems were really, really bad.” That gave her courage, says Affolter: “It’s wonderful how you can find exactly the books you need here.”
Reading hotel, Wurmstein 26, 4822 Bad Goisern am Hallstätter See, from 180 euros/double room, lesehotel.at
Editor’s note: The research trip for this article was partly supported by tour operators, hotels, airlines and/or tourism agencies.