Hotel Otter – theme hotel in Zurich, Switzerland

The fantastically barking Hotel Otter in Zurich, Switzerland 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…

Getting to Hotel Otter, Zurich, Switzerland

Nearest international airport: Zurich International Airport, Switzerland.

Using public transport: Either take a 15-20 minute walk from Zurich’s main station or hop on a train or tram down to Bellevue.

More details: Hotel website