Palais Kinsky

Palais Kinsky is a Baroque palace at Freyung 4 in Vienna's first district, built between 1713 and 1716 by Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt for Count Philipp Vinzenz Daun, a Habsburg field marshal, and later passed by marriage to the Kinsky family, whose name it has carried since.

Hildebrandt designed it as a compact, high Baroque town palace rather than a garden residence, fitting a full sequence of reception rooms, a chapel and a grand staircase onto a single narrow Freyung plot — a contrast worth noting against his sprawling Upper Belvedere, built for a client with room to spread out.

The Kinsky family held the palace into the 20th century; today it is privately operated and houses the auction house im Kinsky, an event and function business, and a restaurant, rather than serving as a family residence or a public museum.

The ground and first floors carry Hildebrandt's original decorative programme largely intact — a marble entrance hall, a grand staircase with stucco figures, and a sequence of salons that now serve as the im Kinsky auction house's viewing rooms and sale rooms.

Im Kinsky, one of Austria's leading auction houses for fine art, antiques and jewellery, holds pre-sale exhibitions in these rooms roughly a week before each auction, open to anyone who walks in during opening hours — this is the main way a visitor sees the interior without attending a private function.

The palace also holds Café-Restaurant Kinsky at ground-floor level and event rooms rented for weddings, conferences and receptions; there is no permanent museum display separate from the auction previews.

The chapel that Hildebrandt built into the palace survives on an upper floor and is among the better-preserved private Baroque chapels in the city centre, though it is not part of the standard auction-preview route and is shown only when a specific event or booking includes it.

A walk through a pre-sale exhibition, when one is running, takes 20 to 40 minutes depending on the size of that auction's catalogue. A coffee or meal at the ground-floor restaurant adds the usual hour or so of any café visit; there is no combined ticketed tour of the whole building.

Im Kinsky runs several auction cycles a year, each preceded by a public viewing period of roughly a week, so the interior is most accessible in the days immediately before a sale — the auction house's own calendar, not the season, decides when the salons are open. Outside those windows the upper rooms are closed to walk-in visitors.

Pre-sale exhibitions at im Kinsky are free to enter during posted viewing hours; there is no admission charge to see the salons during a preview. The auction house's current calendar of sales and viewing days is published on imkinsky.com and is the only reliable way to know whether the rooms are open on a given date, since there is no standing daily opening independent of the auction schedule.

Freyung 4 sits on the small square of the same name, a five-minute walk from Herrengasse U-Bahn station on the U3 line and about the same distance from Schottentor, served by the U2 line and trams 1, 2, 37, 38, 40, 41 and 42. The Freyung itself is pedestrian and hosts an open-air market on some weekdays, which is worth allowing extra walking time around.

The interior is only reliably open during a pre-sale viewing window; arriving outside one of those weeks means the salons are closed even though the ground-floor restaurant and the building's exterior remain accessible.

Because the upper rooms are working auction-preview space, handling the displayed lots is not permitted and bags are checked at the door during viewings, as at any auction house.

The Freyung's own open-air market, held on some weekdays and around Easter and Christmas, can crowd the small square directly in front of the palace entrance, which is worth allowing for when timing a visit to a preview.

The Freyung facade and the marble entrance hall are freely photographed. Photography of the lots on display during a pre-sale exhibition is generally restricted or requires permission from im Kinsky staff, since the images and provenance of unsold works are the auction house's own commercial material rather than a public heritage display.