Seven generations of bespoke shoemaking lie behind Rudolf Scheer & Söhne, whose workshop museum preserves lasts made for the Habsburgs. The business dates to 1816, while hatmaker Mühlbauer began in 1903 and continues through its fourth generation. At A. E. Köchert, the family jewellery atelier on Neuer Markt has worked through six generations since 1814. The jeweller's diamond stars were made for Empress Sisi, giving a named design to that Viennese workshop history.
Bespoke shoemakers since 1816, seventh generation — imperial-royal cobblers whose lasts of the Habsburgs rest in the workshop museum.
Best for Bespoke shoes of dynastic patience
In the workshop museum at Bräunerstraße 4 rest the lasts of the Habsburgs — the carved wooden forms of imperial feet, kept by the house that measured them. Scheer has been making shoes since 1816, and became imperial-royal cobblers to a court that demanded perfection as a condition of employment. The emperors are gone; their lasts remain, archived beside the lasts of seven generations of ordinary distinguished customers, because at Scheer every client receives the same treatment the crown did: measured once, carved in wood, kept forever.
The house is now in its seventh generation of the same family — a succession longer than most nations' constitutions — and it works at a pace it calls, without apology, dynastic patience. A first pair of Scheer shoes is not an errand but an undertaking: measurements, the carving of your personal last, fittings, and the slow hand-sewing that cannot be hurried without becoming something else. The customers who come to Bräunerstraße understand they are commissioning, not shopping.
What the museum of lasts really displays is the house's theory of time. A last outlives fashions, outlives the shoes made on it, often outlives its owner — and while it exists, the house can make you again. Emperors accepted these timescales; moderns must relearn them, and the relearning is part of what Scheer sells. Seven generations at one Vienna address, still carving feet in wood, still keeping every record — bespoke shoemaking as an act of institutional memory, with the Habsburg archive as proof of concept.
Imperial and Royal Court Jeweller since 1814 — the Vienna house that made Empress Sisi's diamond stars, still crafting haute joaillerie in its own Neuer Markt atelier, six generations on.
Best for Bespoke haute joaillerie and the Sisi stars.
Baker Johann Ströck opened his first Vienna shop in 1970 after relocating from Kittsee, Burgenland; son Gerhard took over in 1977 after Johann's stroke. Now run by the third generation, Ströck operates roughly 70 branches and two production facilities across Vienna.
Best for Third-generation family bakery chain with roughly 70 Vienna branches
Johann Ströck, a baker from the apricot-growing town of Kittsee in Burgenland, moved his family to Vienna in 1970 and opened a bakery on Langobardenstrasse in the city's 22nd district. It was a modest start: after a stroke forced Johann to step back in 1977, his son Gerhard took over the business with just ten employees, helped by his mother Hilda, and was soon joined by his brother Robert.
Under that second generation, Ströck expanded well beyond a single shop, building the production capacity to deliver frozen baked goods to branches for on-site baking and to supply Viennese supermarkets directly. The company opened its first dedicated production facility in 1989 and a second a decade later, in 1999, scaling well past its original ten-employee footprint.
Ströck is now led by two married couples from the family's third generation, Gabriele and Gerhard Ströck alongside Robert and Irene Ströck, who have continued expanding the branch network since 1991. More than fifty years after Johann Ströck's single Vienna shop, the company operates roughly 70 branches and two production sites, supplying not just its own stores but hospitals, schools, and kindergartens across the city.
A family-run silversmith with a shop and workshop producing hand-hammered cutlery and tableware. Jean-Paul Vaugoin is the sixth-generation owner; the company was founded in 1847.
Best for Hand-hammered silver cutlery and tableware from a sixth-generation silversmith founded in 1847
A family workshop producing brass, wood, and leather objects including bookends, ashtrays, and small sculptures. The workshop was founded at Bernardgasse in 1906 and has been run by four generations of the Auböck family.
Best for Family workshop producing brass, wood, and leather objects including bookends, ashtrays
A family haberdashery selling European fabrics, ties, pocket squares, bow ties, ascots, and scarves. Founded in 1866, at its current address since 1881, and family-run for seven generations.
Best for Family haberdashery selling European fabrics, ties, pocket squares, bow ties, ascots
Buchbinderei Prouza, at Esterhazygasse 12/2/2 in Vienna's 6th district, is a three-generation family bindery that started with nothing more than a home workshop.
Best for Custom binding, restoration and leather work from a family bindery
Buchbinderei Prouza, at Esterhazygasse 12/2/2 in Vienna's 6th district, is a three-generation family bindery that started with nothing more than a home workshop. Gerhart Prouza founded it in the 1980s without significant capital; his daughter Manuela joined in 1984 and became the first woman to own the business outright in 2001 — a succession the workshop's own site states directly, not a detail inferred from elsewhere.
The bindery's stated work covers custom-bound books and dissertations, photo albums, protective boxes and cases (Schuber), and restoration and repair of existing bindings — a spread that pairs new commissioned work with restoration and repair of older books. Prouza frames its own approach around "quality and sustainability," stating the goal is binding that lets a book last for centuries rather than merely hold together for a season — the workshop's own claim, offered here as a stated philosophy rather than a verified material-science fact.
The workshop keeps limited public hours (Monday and Thursday mornings and early afternoons, other weekdays by appointment only), consistent with a small hand-operation serving libraries, publishers, artists, and private clients directly rather than walk-in retail traffic.
TR Handschuhe is a Vienna glove house run by Thomas Riemer, who entered the trade in his early twenties working alongside his father Erwin Riemer, co-owner of RIKA — an Austrian glove brand founded in the 1960s that made fashion and sports gloves in workshops across Austria and Hungary.
Best for Hand-stitched Vienna gloves in peccary and doeskin from a second-generation
TR Handschuhe is a Vienna glove house run by Thomas Riemer, who entered the trade in his early twenties working alongside his father Erwin Riemer, co-owner of RIKA — an Austrian glove brand founded in the 1960s that made fashion and sports gloves in workshops across Austria and Hungary. That lineage makes Thomas Riemer a second-generation glove maker rather than a new entrant borrowing an old craft's name, at a moment when the site itself notes no new apprentices have entered the Austrian glove trade since 1989.
The process the house describes is hand work at every stage: leather is soaked and stretched for 24 hours before a pair is hand-cut individually, and stitching is done freehand by seamstresses without pre-marked guides, a pace the site puts at about three fully hand-stitched pairs per person per working day. Leather comes, in the site's own words, from "some of the best Austrian, German, Finnish, French or Swiss tanneries," and finished gloves use peccary, goatskin, doeskin, and hair-sheep nappa, lined in cashmere or silk.
The range has grown to include leather accessories — bags, weekender luggage, toiletry cases — alongside the gloves, but gloves remain the founding product and the reason customers first come to the house. A live 2025 collection and worldwide shipping confirm this is a currently trading business, not a legacy name kept alive only in archives.
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