The hotel at Koningin Astridplein 7 has had four names and one architect. Michael Graves, the American architect who led postmodernism through the 1980s and early 1990s, designed it as the Astrid Park Plaza, completed in 1993 directly opposite Antwerp Central station. It became the Radisson SAS Astrid in December 2008 and then the Radisson Blu Astrid Hotel, the name under which it is still widely listed. Radisson now calls it the Radisson Blu Hotel, Antwerp City Centre.

The building rises to about 50 metres, a ground floor and eleven storeys above it, and holds 253 rooms and suites, a ballroom for 600 and some 15 meeting rooms. Its first neighbour is the station: the front door is a short walk across the square from the station that Louis Delacenserie designed, opened in 1905.

Graves in Antwerp

Graves, born in Indianapolis in 1934, taught at Princeton for nearly four decades and ran his practice from the town until his death in 2015. His Portland Building in Oregon, opened in 1982, made his name; the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin hotels in Florida, from the late 1980s, made him a hotel architect; his kettle for Alessi in 1985, and from 1999 a range of housewares for Target, put his designs in ordinary kitchens. The Antwerp commission came at the height of his fame: a business hotel and mixed-use complex of about 319,000 square feet, recorded in a list of his hospitality projects as the Astrid Park Plaza Hotel.

The design was meant to echo the station, a neo-Renaissance building with a 75-metre dome that Antwerp calls its railway cathedral. Not everyone thinks it succeeds: one city guide calls the attempt “not quite successful”, and Fodor’s finds the hotel somewhat generic and the square outside noisy.

From Park Plaza to Radisson

The change of flag was announced on 5 November 2008. Rezidor, the group behind the Radisson SAS hotels, took the Astrid hotel, then 247 rooms including 19 apartments, in a joint project with Elbit Imaging, together with a 59-room Park Inn about 50 metres along the square. With the existing Radisson SAS Park Lane, that gave the group three hotels in the city. “These new openings will strengthen our position in Belgium,” said Kurt Ritter, Rezidor’s chief executive. The Park Lane name, and a 174-room building by the Stadspark, now belong to Van der Valk, which opened its second Antwerp hotel there in December 2024 after a spell as a care home.

The rooms, meeting rooms and public spaces were renovated by April 2018, and the carpets came out of the rooms in favour of wooden floors; Radisson credits the room design to Alex Kravetz. Rooms now run from a standard of 27 square metres to the Diamond suite of 89, with junior suites, apartments and family rooms in between. Breakfast is served in the Aurora room on the second floor, looking out over the station and the square; Made in Antwerp is the restaurant and bar, with Belgian and international dishes; and Bagelstein sells bagels and coffee on the ground floor. There is a fitness room, a sauna and a steam bath, and Fodor’s lists a pool among the facilities. The hotel holds Green Key certification and is smoke-free.

Chocolate downstairs, trains outside

Since 27 March 2019 the same building has also housed Chocolate Nation, the chocolate museum that counted its millionth visitor in October 2025, across 4,000 square metres. Radisson puts it 30 metres from the hotel lobby; Antwerp Zoo is about 330 metres away and the Cathedral of Our Lady about 1.4 kilometres. The Brussels Airport Express reaches Antwerp Central in about 34 minutes, and the hotel’s underground car park has six charging points for electric cars and a height limit of 1.80 metres.

That location is the hotel’s case, and its limitation. Antwerp had 75 hotels and 5,823 rooms in May 2024, against 65 hotels and 4,946 rooms in 2019, according to figures VRT reported in December 2024, and few of them stand directly opposite the station. The price of the address is the view: the city’s own alderman for urban development, Patrick Janssens, says the square in front of it is “actually not a pleasant square for anyone”.

A new square

Janssens said it on 1 June 2026, when the city approved a concept design for the Koningin Astridplein, chosen from four proposals. The central part is to become a green park zone with 101 trees, not large ones, because the car park lies underneath. A big open space stays in front of the station for events, and the Ferris wheel can stay. The tram loop around the square goes, but cars and trams will keep running along the Radisson side. Underground, level minus one becomes a larger bicycle park with a passage to the station and the Astrid and Diamant metro stops, and the cars move down to minus two. A preliminary design is due by autumn 2027; Janssens has said the square will not be finished before the end of the current council term.

The hotel stands to gain more from those 101 trees than from any renovation of its own, because its problem was never the rooms but the view of the traffic between it and the station. Graves gave the square a postmodern front in 1993; the city is now, slowly, giving that front something to look at.

Rates and rooms are on Radisson’s own page for the hotel on the Koningin Astridplein. Check-in is from 15:00, which leaves time for a train.