Villa Life

At a time of life when most of us anticipate that we will be relaxing and putting our feet up for a bit, Harry Niessner, the owner of Prague’s unique gay resort Villa Mansland, is doing just the opposite.

For, as he celebrates his 64th birthday this month, Harry is more active than ever and about to embark upon a major new development in his internationally well-known business.

Born in Bavaria, to where his parents had fled after Russian armies attacked their home region of East Prussia towards the end of the Second World War, Harry grew up in a family with a strong background in gastronomy and catering.  One branch had run restaurants at the major East Prussian railway stations of Allenstein and Königsberg, while another had been involved in catering in Berlin.
Nevertheless, Harry’s education in business and politics, as well as the English and French languages, pushed him towards a career in the international pharmaceutical industry.

Eventually running his own company in Cologne, in the 1990s he took advantage of the collapse of communism to expand into the Eastern European market where, as well as marketing his German company’s pharmaceutical products, he moved into property development.

As a gay man with a keen eye for business, Harry soon saw the hitherto unexploited opportunity to provide accommodation for the many gay visitors among the new wave of tourists coming to the countries that had previously been hidden away behind the Iron Curtain.  After building up a sizable property portfolio of holiday flats for rent, in 1998 he decided to move on to a full-sized and fully equipped hotel aimed at the same market.

In the past 11 years, Harry has completely transformed the property he alighted on.  “Villa Mansland was in a dreadful state at that time”, he says, “and it took an immense amount of time, money and sheer and persistent hard work to get it where it is today.”

As well as transforming the property – a three-storey building set in a charming garden just a short stroll from the Prague’s Ladvi metro station – Harry’s commercial experience also proved invaluable in such key areas as marketing and customer relations, in which the Czech people themselves, after nearly 50 years in a rigidly state-controlled economy, had virtually no experience.  “Training my staff to international standards has been a major focus”, says Harry, “but I’ve now built up a steady and reliable team, headed by my resident manager Kiril, who are a real credit to the business.”

(part 2 of this interview with Harry appears here tomorrow…)