Zurich's Widder Hotel: A Masterpiece Of Design & Imagination

Forbes

10-04-2025

A guest suite at Zurich's Widder Hotel.
The Widder Hotel is routinely ranked among the best hotels in Zurich, the picture-perfect city best known for Swiss banking that ranks at the top of world metropolises for its quality of life.
The Widder is currently celebrating its 30th anniversary yet it's a hotel that defies expectations and rewires your brain. It was recently awarded two Michelin keys for it high level of service and five star comforts, but architecturally, it's not a classic hotel. It's a clever puzzle created out of nine townhouses dating back as far as the 15th century, where the alleyways are now corridors, the ceilings retain their vintage beams, and there are glass-walled elevators. A piece of a Roman stone wall was unearthed, and the hotel was built around it, yet the furnishings are a casting call for mid-century modern masterpieces by the likes of Charles and Ray Eames, Mies van der Rohe, Eileen Gray, and Le Corbusier.
Guestroom at the Widder Hotel.
Yet that still doesn't paint the entire picture. Imagine you had a rich, eccentric uncle with an unlimited budget and excellent but quirky taste who could piece such a hotel together in the heart of the medieval maze of Zurich, on a street called Rennweg, filled with classic Swiss design shops in houses of a similar vintage. For Zurich architect Tilla Theus, creating the hotel was a painstaking process that took a decade, enlisting a small army of designers, contractors, and conservators. It's a mashup of design imagination and restoration that set the bar three decades ago for what constitutes a hotel.
A loft at the Widder Hotel
Each of the 49 guest rooms is different and ranges from cozy rooms with leaded glass windows, marquetry, and parquet to a pop art loft that looks like it's straight from New York's Chelsea neighborhood, circa 1970. Artwork by Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Max Bill, Serge Poliakoff, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Alberto Giacometti can be found throughout the property. Yet The Widder is not an art hotel. It's a living, breathing hotel that is also supremely comfortable. The rooms feel more like apartments; if you want to stay put, you can gaze out onto the pedestrian-filled Rennweg and not feel like you're missing anything.
Guestroom at the Widder Hotel.
Classic Eames lounge chairs are ubiquitous, and you might feel, as I did, that you are simultaneously in a work of art, that eccentric uncle's historic home, and a sleekly high-tech, high-touch hotel. Service is friendly but discreet, something the Swiss have mastered like few others.
The Widder Bar.
The Widder Bar is a high point of any stay, drawing in well-dressed and well-heeled patrons to a mirrored bar that boasts (a very un-Swiss-like thing to do) of having more than 650 whiskies and 1,200 spirits. In summer, the Widder Garden is open for alfresco lounging. There are two restaurants: the Widder Restaurant, where Chef Stefan Heilemannich has been awarded two Michelin stars, and the brasserie-like Boucherie AuGust. The latter was my choice, a lively room that felt like an upscale butcher shop turned restaurant with as many locals as hotel guests. Expect classic Swiss mountain fare, including an array of sausages, sliced veal Zurich-style in a cream sauce with mushrooms, homemade pâtés, terrines pates, and beef tartare.
Boucherie AuGust at the Widder Hotel.
The Widder gives you the feeling of being in the center of things, and you are more or less in the very heart of this amazing city. The Bahnhofstrasse and the Hauptbahnhof, the central train station, are a few minutes walk away. The city's best sights are as well, like the Grossmünster church, the Opera House, and the waterfront park on Lake Zurich.
The Widder belongs to a small hospitality group called The Living Circle, which includes hotels, restaurants, organic farms, and a vineyard in Ascona, in the southern Swiss canton of Ticino. Sister properties include another of Zurich's storied city-center luxury hotels, the Storchen, a few minutes away by foot, and the Alex Lake Zurich, a white-clad International Style resort located about 20 minutes outside the city on the shores of Lake Zurich.
I loved the Widder for its design, location, and somewhat cheeky attitude towards stuffiness. Brilliantly designed but remarkably unselfconscious, it may be the quintessential Zurich hotel.
Details at the Widder Hotel.