H15 Boutique Hotel

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years it’s that time spent anointing the “next Prague” or the “new Berlin” is time wasted. So we’ll leave it at this: if you haven’t done so already, it’s time to get yourself to Warsaw. Like a few other Eastern European capitals we could name, it evolved more or less in isolation for a crucial few decades — and now that the period of isolation is over, the result is a modern city with a remarkably unique personality. And if it’s arrived as a travel destination, boutique hotels are never far behind; you can take H15 Boutique Hotel as Exhibit A.

The hotel is housed in a 19th-century building, but the nostalgia trip ends there. Inside you’ll find clean-lined contemporary suites, which can pretty fairly be called “apartments” without exaggeration — the smallest, a junior suite, is more or less a studio apartment, at 345 square feet, and the Prestige suites, at nearly 800, feel properly residential, complete with well-equipped kitchenettes. At all sizes they’re inspiringly modern, with Italian designer furnishings and the usual complement of electronics.

In short, it’s a proper contemporary boutique hotel, of just the sort you’re used to seeing in Prague or Berlin — and of comparable quality as well. The restaurant, charmingly, contains some nods to the building’s twentieth-century history — the occasional hammer and sickle motif is held over from the house’s tenure as the Soviet embassy, and some Marilyn Monroe portraits are included for Cold War balance. Call it the new Warsaw.