David Whitley visits the supposedly dull banking city of Zurich, only to find that the hoteliers have clearly been at the absinthe.
Boring Swiss?
The Swiss, it’s fair to say, have something of a reputation for being a little bit boring. They tinker with clocks, make trains run on time and live in pretty-but-dull mountain villages. It’s all very nice, but not particularly exciting.
This reputation, of course, is an absolute travesty. This is the country where LSD and absinthe were all invented, for heaven’s sake. It is a land where cannabis-flavoured iced tea is a common occurrence in train station vending machines.
And where else on the planet would create an awkward-to-eat triangular chocolate bar and then embark on a monopolistic crusade to ensure it’s the only confectionary available in the world’s airports?
Zurich’s dull reputation
But if the Swiss have been tarred with an unfair reputation, then the people of Zurich – the country’s biggest city – have it even worse. The city is a walking grey stereotype; soulless drones putting in the hours at international banking firms, with nary a snow-capped mountain to perk them up.
Again, this is manifestly out of order. Zurich is actually in a wonderfully pretty location, with a big lake acting as a playground for all. It also has a pulsating nightlife, with the city centre and the newly hip streets of Zurich West teeming with young drinkers carrying on way into the night.
It’s no coincidence that Europe’s biggest party takes place here every year – the Street Parade even outdoes London’s Notting Hill Carnival, and is essentially one giant rave.
Zurich’s bizarre hotels
But what the good folk of Zurich do to their bars and restaurants isn’t a patch on what happens when they’re let loose with a hotel. Barring the odd multinational chain, it seems as though every establishment has been touched with the wacky stick. It’s almost as if all the hoteliers are in competition to see who can come up with the biggest gimmick.
Hotel Platenhoff
On the milder end of the scale is the Hotel Platenhoff, which has turned its reception into a Student Union coffee house, its restaurant into an art gallery and its bedrooms into miniature private nightclubs.
The café blended into the entrance hall is almost permanently thronging with students from the nearby university, which gives the whole place a highly sociable feel. Their more trendy lecturers can be found doing lunch in the (excellent) restaurant, which gives its wall space over to local and international artists.
The setting is the key to the artwork, though, and it all appears to be made from forks and spoons.
Upstairs things are just as interesting. The rooms borrow from Japanese design, with low beds, wooden parquet flooring and lots of straight lines. It’s all very stylish, but the coup de grace is the lighting – movable multi-coloured beams that would be more at home illuminating a dance floor.
Kafi Schnaps
The psychedelic fairy dust has also been sprinkled in the budget hotel sector. The Kafi Schnaps slightly north of the centre is essentially a coffee shop/ schnapps bar with a few rooms tacked on.
In a building owned by a university fencing club (which still practices in the basement), it’s delightfully sketchy and laissez-faire. Go in and ask to see a room, and there’s a high chance that the staff have even forgotten that they’re there.
But they are, and they’re themed to a ludicrous degree. Each one is based on a different flavour of schnapps. This means that the plum room has little purple cushions bulging randomly out of the wall, while the kirsch (black cherry) one has a carpet designed to look like wood chippings and has pink-rimmed trees painted all over the shop. This is, it seems, regarded as being perfectly normal.
Hotel Otter
This spirit also infuses the fantastically barking Hotel Otter, which deserves showering with awards for its name alone. Entry is through the downstairs bar. It has a cow bone for a door handle and a plastic snake in a ‘desert oasis’ near the air vent.
There are 22 rooms in the hotel, and two of them are completely overhauled every year. Sometimes they let artists and designers do them, sometimes DJs. And then sometimes they just let the staff loose with silly ideas they dreamt up over a few too many stiff drinks in the pub.
The results are brilliantly bonkers rooms such as Number 501, which has ‘1001 Nights’ scrawled on the door and a full-on Arabian Nights décor inside. Star-spangled blue minarets adorn the gold-painted walls, while liberal lashings of Arabic script, distinctly Middle Eastern furniture and a four-poster bed that screams Scheherezade top things off nicely.
Other rooms include Heaven and Hell (where peaceful blue walls decorated with angels are offset by a blood red bed and flames made of wood), Pop, Monroe and Japan. A word of warning for anyone booking into Carmen, however: you had better really like pink…
Hotel Rutli
It’s not just arty little hotels that are getting in on the act, however. The Hotel Rutli is at first glance just an ordinary three star hotel, catering for the business traveller and doing everything precisely as standard.
That is unless you’re in one of the ‘City Rooms’, which bear all the hallmarks of a savvy marketing department latching on to a trend. They lack the thoroughly mental intense absurdity of the Otter’s efforts, but they’re well done all the same.
The idea was to let a couple of local graffiti artists loose on the rooms, and see what they came out with. A lot of it is reasonably standard (but stylish) tagging and motifs, but on occasions Drim and Rast have been inspired. Counting the Sheep is devoted to the storytelling of sleep, with lambs on the wall, ‘Good Night’ sprayed opposite the bed and, er, a green goblin in a pixie hat. The odds of having sweet dreams appear to be entirely dependent on where you look…
Search for Zurich hotels, car hire, tours, activities and flights.*
