Artists In Residence

AN ICONIC HOTEL PLAYS HOST TO THE WORLD’S GREATEST CONTEMPORARY ART.

- Whitney Robinson

Hotels can be famous for a lot of things: The best service, for instance. A hangout pool. The most acclaimed restaurant, or a five-star spa. At Baur au Lac in Zurich, which has been owned by the same family and in continuous operation since 1844, there are certainly many of those (discreet and personal service, check; 119 guest rooms with glamorous interiors, check; a pop-up Matsuhisa restaurant, check). But for me, it’s the hotel’s location, with a private garden bordering Lake Zurich, that sets it apart from the rest. “It’s like a private park in the middle of Zurich. There is nothing else like it in the city,” proprietor Gigi Kracht tells me by phone from Switzerland. (Kracht’s husband, Andrea, is a sixth-generation direct descendant of the founder.) “People love the garden for its vastness, cleanliness, and tranquility.”