History of the Hotel

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Stacija Suntaži is 45 minutes' drive from Riga. It used to be the only station between Saulrieši and Ērgļi where you could change routes. It was then closed after the demolition of the tracks. Now, after four years of building, the station has been turned into a hotel.

Suntaži station was opened in 1935. It was destroyed during the war, but soon after the war a new, smaller station building was built again. However, it was closed in 2009 with the demolition of the tracks. It has been owned by Liene Kemzane's family for four years, and it was decided to turn it into a hotel. She says: "We bought the building four years ago at an auction from Latvian Railways. There was no other bidder. The building was a bit different. The windows were boarded up. It had been waiting for its owner for a long time. It had probably been vacant for ten or fifteen years. So there are not that many artefacts inside. The bench had probably been converted into fuel, hence the broken floors."

When Liene and her husband bought the station, they didn't know what they were going to do with it. But the new owner was convinced that she wanted to buy it because she had lived in Suntaži all her childhood. "All my first experiences to Riga were on this train. The train was great, it was a big part of my childhood. Nostalgia played a big role in the purchase of the estate, of course. Maybe the restoration of the building was also partially, maybe not only partially, more of a tribute to my home town."

Although the station is 270 square metres, which is much larger than other stations, the owners were not sure whether the building would be big enough for a hotel. However, the final decision was for a hotel. As the building is quite old, it consists of two parts. One part was built during the Latvian period and the other during the Soviet period. So the colour of the hotel also had to be changed. Liene: "It was yellow before. At first, we decided on yellow, which was the colors of the station before it was first destroyed. We wanted to restore it as such as a tribute to the history of it, but when the war in Ukraine broke out, we decided to do away with the yellow. We'll make it like it was after the first restoration of the site - white and black."