When I went to Switzerland the other day, it was at least a month between booking flights to Geneva and making any decisions whatsoever about where I was going and what I was doing when I landed. I’d lived in Switzerland so I’d covered a lot of the country, albeit in brief day trips. My last three trips to Switzerland, over New Year 2019-20, a long weekend in 2017 and the county trip to Grindelwald in 2014, had all pretty much been to the Oberland so I should go somewhere different but winter in Switzerland does pull me really hard towards that region. But no!
I looked for interesting places to stay instead. Barrels, prisons, mountain huts, igloos, geometric tents and so on, and all well out of my budget. So I took to the shores of Lac Leman, Lake Geneva, instead and stumbled across an entire chain of interesting hotels, the most interesting of which was the Swiss Chocolate Hotel in Lausanne. So that’s where I decided to go. Lac Leman is not an un-interesting place to spend a weekend, as I discovered, but the Swiss Chocolate Hotel is a great base.
First of all, it’s a five to ten minute walk from the cathedral, which is always a bonus as far as I’m concerned. It’s, frankly, an absolute pig to walk up to from the main station but there’s a metro station a three-minute walk downhill (Bessières) for when you want to go down to the bottom of town and a metro station a five-minute walk uphill (Ours) for when you’re coming up from the station and don’t even want the three-minute last bit of the uphill walk back.
From the outside it’s nothing remarkable. Inside… well, first is a little reception with a screen to check in yourself although there’s usually someone at reception from early morning until reasonably late in the evening. If there’s no one in, you can use reception at their sister hotel the Swiss Wine Hotel just round the corner from Bessières. Reception is a bit of a chocolate shop and breakfast features chocolate heavily – if you don’t want the full breakfast, you can have just a coffee and a chocolate croissant but you can just buy Swiss chocolate from here. Or you can go down three doors to the Coop shopping centre and buy some chocolate from there.
The chocolate-themed reception is one thing but it’s about to get better. Because next to the lift is a chocolate fountain! It doesn’t run 24/7 and I did encounter it switched off once (it doesn’t look very appetising when it’s solidifying) but it’s generally running as long as there’s someone in reception, and there’s a jar of wafer rolls to dip in it any time you pass by. It took me 24 hours to be brave enough, for some reason but when I came in on Saturday evening, full of fondue and half-frozen from snowshoeing, I took a wafer from the jar and swirled it under the chocolate fountain. Sunday morning was less triumphant. I knew it had splashed a bit but I couldn’t see any chocolate on my scarf, so I assumed it wasn’t as bad as I thought. I walked all the way down through Lausanne to the station, got some cash out, bought a train ticket, bought some breakfast and requested the change be in small coins for the lockers at Maison Cailler, ate my breakfast, touched my face and discovered that I was just covered in chocolate. Thanks for mentioning it, helpful coin lady in the Coop.
Then there’s the lift. You go in the door and your senses are just assaulted with floor to ceiling vintage chocolate adverts. I took quite a few selfies either in the mirror or just ordinary selfies. It’s a profusion of colour you don’t see anywhere else in a hotel that’s generally themed in brown with red highlights. It’s dizzying, not helped by the fact that the door to the actual hotel corridors is not the door you came in on the ground floor but the one on the left. It’s just such a tone change from the shop-like ground floor to the dark brown upstairs corridors to have this purple and red and blue and white lift as a transition.
Ok, upstairs. I was on the 7th floor and you step out of the technicolour lift into a dark brown corridor, decorated with huge sepia-toned pictures of figures from Swiss chocolate history. I had Rudolf Sprüngli-Ammann right outside my door. He was the son of David Sprüngli, a Zurich confectioner and after running a bakery and chocolate shop together, they opened a commercial chocolate factory in 1845. Rudolf’s son Johann acquired Rodolphe Lindt’s chocolate factory in 1899 and the company known legally today as Lindt & Sprüngli (although generally you’ll only see Lindt on the packaging) was born.
And then there’s the room itself. The numbers on each door are on chocolate bars – not real ones, obviously – which was one of my favourite touches. The bedside table was a little stack of chocolate chunks. The patterns running across the ceiling and on the chair at the little desk took a moment to recognise but they’re cocoa beans. You get a little free chocolate at check-in so I stood in my chocolate-themed room, with the cathedral towers visible from the window, eating my chocolate in the chocolate hotel.
So, obviously, it’s a lot of fun. There are downsides: the room is far too hot and for environmental reasons, they limit your control over the heating and air conditioning, so I had the window open almost from the minute I arrived until I left. The bathroom is so small that you have to step into the shower to have enough space to open and close the door. I have mixed feelings about the sink not actually being in the bathroom and, as with more and more hotels, the lighting is inadequate. As I was mostly only there to either sleep or persuade my belongings back into my small easyJet-sized backpack, it didn’t matter too much that it was a bit dark but I think it wouldn’t hurt to have a proper overhead light in the bedroom part as well as in the entrance and the bathroom. There’s a fridge, a throwback to the days when they used to provide a minibar but it’s more efficient to not stock it anymore and although you can use it for medicine and your own food, the rules state that you should only be filling it with food and drink you bought at reception and not bringing your own in. So I just left all my food on the windowsill, under the open window. If you scan the QR code on your room card, it tells you all the rules and all the answers to questions you’d never think to ask and that seems to hint that there are creatures in the hotel that shouldn’t be there – whether it’s bugs or mice, I wasn’t sure. I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense in a hotel that’s full of chocolate but it’s not something I’d advertise to guests, even hidden away in the rules that surely hardly anyone bothers to read in full.
As for price: a room for tonight would be CHF 96.90, which is about £91 / €105 / $124. It’s not the cheapest. I paid a little less than that but a little more once you include VAT and city tax and I’d be looking for somewhere cheaper if I was staying more than the two nights. But sometimes when you’re doing a quick weekend away, you want somewhere interesting to stay and the Swiss Chocolate Hotel definitely fulfilled that.
I Am A Polar Bear 