What’s the buzz? For a few days in June, the Art Basel fair puts the city at the centre of the global art world, with all the galleries, collectors, celebrities, money, lavish dinners and cocktails that brings with it. For the rest of the year it is an industrial and banking hub with a quaint medieval old town. Yet despite its wealth and the world’s premier art fair, it has, astonishingly, only one five-star hotel, Les Trois Rois, an exemplar of solidly traditional, quiet, smooth-running Swiss luxury.
Now, though, the hotel has commissioned Basel’s most famous architects, Herzog & de Meuron, to supercharge one of its two wings. After two years of renovation works, it will have its official launch on June 14, just in time for this year’s Art Basel (from June 19 to 22).
Herzog & de Meuron are the designers of Tate Modern, the Beijing Bird’s Nest stadium and the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, among many other landmarks, but compared with those megastructures, this is an intimate, playful blast of pleasure. “Basel is not Paris or London,” Jacques Herzog tells me. “This hotel will make the city more attractive to visitors, it wants to make a difference.”
Location, location, location The hotel overlooks the fast-flowing river Rhine with a sweeping panorama of the city, including Herzog & de Meuron’s controversial towers for pharma giant Roche. It’s in the old town, moments from the Marktplatz and town hall, and a short walk from the Kunstmuseum, the art museum, founded in 1661.
The hotel began life as an inn in 1681, or perhaps earlier (the guest book runs from Napoleon Bonaparte to Charles Dickens and Lana del Rey). A hand-painted sign from 1759 hangs above the lobby and 18th century carved and painted wooden figures of the three kings bearing gifts for the infant Jesus adorn its front. The current incarnation dates from 1844, while the Herzog & de Meuron wing is contained in the classical shell of a former bank building, built in 1903.
Checking in There are 74 guest bedrooms in the hotel’s main building; the new wing contains two bedrooms, five suites, an elegant event space, a restaurant, and a top-floor Japanese-inspired wellbeing area called Seijaku.
Stroll through the corridor linking the old and new wings and you might encounter a whiff of expensive-smelling smoke. The most intense space of the renovation is a cigar lounge known as The Council, a dark, brooding room with 7-metre-high walls, squeezed between a pair of opposing fireplaces.
Masculine barely begins to describe it, and it has an irresistible kind of sci-fi/horror meets ski-chalet chic. Ceramic tiles have been hand-moulded into crumbly, dark shapes so that the slightly sloping walls look like hot lava. It’s an impression reinforced by spotlit red velvet tables and stools, all designed by Herzog himself including the cutesy three-legged velvet table lamps.
Herzog, who, despite an otherwise admirably healthy lifestyle, does enjoy a cigar, has clearly had fun here. This is a dark space for moneyed people but there is a sly humour enjoyably undermining it.
And the bedrooms? Herzog & de Meuron is known for its intense post-industrial cultural spaces, such as the huge concrete volumes of Hong Kong’s M+ Museum. The four new junior suites are not that at all, but rather light, luxurious and uplifting. Tinged with a hint of 1970s luxe, their mix of white marble and wood, red velvet and space-age rococo curves entertains and seduces.
Herzog creates fluid, flowing spaces, theatrically defined by curtains rather than walls and the cocktail of occasional classic Italian designs with his own, strangely beautiful bespoke pieces, is surprising and effective. “I’ve been personally involved in almost every detail,” he says. “And most of the designs were developed for my own home — I wanted this to be like an extension of my own personal space.”
Best among the designs is the Exhale lamp designed for this project, a handblown shade in a cloud-shape that captures the breath of its blower in a moment of ephemerality. Each is a unique shape. “It is not art,” Herzog says, carefully, “and I have never been a designer — but it is perhaps somewhere between art and design.” It’s worth glancing at the floors too, where marble and timber tessellations meld into one another in delicate patterns, so subtle and careful you might never notice.
A room fit for a king The former presidential suite is now the Suite des Rois, an entire floor (240-metre sq) of space including a circular dining room, private gym, balcony and bedrooms. There are wavy walls covered in wood-grain picked out in silver on silk and overscaled pop mid-century furniture in deep, rich lacquer, all in deliberate contrast to the classical rococo of the old rooms.
What about the spa? Seijaku is set under the dark eaves of the building, so you can indulge in a moment of serenity while looking down on Basel’s bustling inhabitants. At its heart is a sunken conversation pit around a freestanding fireplace with an oval window above like an eye to the sky — a far cry from any of the Swiss Alpine clichés you might expect. Treatment rooms are all a bit Kyoto, with tatami mats and dark timber beams.
What about the food? The existing brasserie, bistro and bar have been supplemented by Banks, a grand new restaurant that will open in September. Housed in what was once a banking hall, the tellers’ desks replaced by a central zinc-topped bar, it is crowned by a vivid and colourfully chaotic art installation by locals Steiner & Lenzlinger. The ceiling above is now mirrored in a kind of rococo-disco touch and the seats are upholstered in shades of pink and purple velvet, adding a dash of louche.
The damage Extensive. Double rooms start from SFr600 (£540) per night including breakfast; junior suites in the new wing cost from SFr1,200, the Suite des Rois from SFr12,000.
Elevator pitch Solid Basel bourgeois with a delicious Herzog & de Meuron twist.
Edwin Heathcote was a guest of Les Trois Rois (Lestroisrois.com)
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