Art Nouveau Luxury In An Estonian Resort Town: Villa Ammende

Villa Ammende

It was a department store that made Hermann Leopold Ammende the wealthiest man in the coastal Estonian resort town of Pärnu, and that allowed him to build the mansion that now bears his name. But while the department store surely sold practical goods, the Balto-German magnate's home became far more fanciful.

Built very quickly in 1905, Villa Ammende is a jewel of art nouveau design—as was the fashion at the time— and specifically Jugendstil, a subset of art nouveau that's focused on plants, flowers and other forms from nature. (It's a style I discovered via a French collector in rural Portugal, of all places.) It comes across as romantic, and for good reason: Ammende had needed a venue for the wedding of his beloved only daughter and determined that nothing in the area was suitable.

He hired the architecture bureau Miertiz & Gerassimov in St. Petersburg (though the lead architect was Finnish and only working in Russia). It was a departure from the conservative modernism favored by the local Balto-Germanic crowd and in line with the trends of the emerging national bourgeoisie.

A guest room

But you don't need a lesson in family history, nor in art history, to appreciate Villa Ammende. Over the years, the family's fortunes changed, and the villa was rented to a family who ran a casino on the ground floor—a gathering place for local elites, like the first president of the first Republic of Estonia, Konstantin Päts. In 1940 the house fell into the hands of the Russian military authorities. During the German occupation, it held a casino for the officers.

Vacationers gave up on Pärnu during the 1980s, as the Soviet Union was collapsing. The house became derelict, until 1995, when two Estonian businessmen purchased it in the mid-1990s, undertook a thorough restoration with the help of researchers and archivists, and opened it as a hotel and restaurant in 1999.

As with all good hotel origin stories, there were points when the owners were called crazy, which they now retell with pride, having proved their critics wrong. They aimed to restore it to the exact state it has been in 110 years earlier (after the Soviets had removed most of the art nouveau elements). Floors and window frames were restored in part with old materials and details, and paintings were restored with chalk paints.

Dinner can be served in the guest rooms

After another renovation in 2020, the 13 rooms in the main villa and 6 others in a second house in the garden are generous in size and tricked out with comforts. Along with the public spaces, they’re full of art nouveau paintings on walls and ceilings, robust woodcuts on the threshold strips, majestic chandeliers, plaster decor and stately glazed ovens.

Mine had a gorgeous, curvaceous, wood-backed blue velvet couch, a floor lamp with graceful metal details that resemble chrysanthemums, and an enormous, triangular jacuzzi tub in the bathroom. This being a Nordic country, other rooms have their own saunas.

Each room has a dining table, and when guests arrive, they find them set with china and crystal, in case they choose to dine in privacy. Downstairs is only slightly less intimate, with a handful of tables scattered in separate salons, which are known by the color of the paint on the walls. One has a table on a small platform inside a rounded picture window.

One of the dining rooms

The experience takes a page from an early 20th-century cookbook. "When a person is upset, angry, for some reason, sulky or in other words scared," it states, "one should consider postponing the meal until a better mood has been achieved."

At any rate, the high-quality, low-fuss food is likely to improve one's mood. It's local and seasonal and all of that, but it's also a la carte, a welcome relief from the information overload of a tasting menu. The tightly edited menu changes weekly but generally includes things like potato and spinach "cappuccino" (creamy soup) with salted pike perch, crawfish and trout roe, and halibut with smoked fish cream and tarragon mayonnaise.

Breakfast is also a la carte—still a rarity in Europe—with luxurious dishes like fried eggs with barbecued duck confit, and 63° egg with smoked salmon and brioche. Sparkling wine is included—perhaps a tribute to the festive occasion that predicated the house.