Nobleman Jozef Szentiványi built a hunting lodge on the shore of Štrbské Pleso lake in 1872, later replacing it with the more elaborate villa, called Jánošík after a Slovak folk hero, that still stands as the complex’s oldest building today, completed in 1893. Its aristocratic guest list included members of the Habsburg and Coburg royal houses along with Serbia’s King Milan. Two more buildings joined it over the following decades: Kriváň, a Belle Époque hotel in the Secession style completed in 1906, and Hviezdoslav, added in 1923 with Rondo-Cubist interiors and named for Slovakia’s national poet.
Hviezdoslav hosted a French-inspired restaurant built for the 1935 FIS World Ski Championships before Czechoslovakia’s communist government converted the entire complex into a sanatorium in 1953, a use that continued for decades until deteriorating conditions forced its closure. Architect Peter Černo led a four-year restoration beginning in 2003 that drew on archival photographs to guide the reconstruction, reopening the three connected buildings as a single luxury hotel within Tatra National Park.
