Sorell Hotel Rutli in Zurich, Switzerland

At first glance, the Sorell Hotel Rutli in Zurich, Switzerland is just an ordinary three star hotel, catering for the business traveller and doing everything precisely as standard.
That is unless you’re in one of the ‘City Rooms’, which bear all the hallmarks of a savvy marketing department latching on to a trend for art/ design hotels.
The idea was to let a couple of local graffiti artists loose on the rooms, and see what they came out with. A lot of it is reasonably standard (but stylish) tagging and motifs, but on occasions Drim and Rast have been inspired.
Counting the Sheep is devoted to the storytelling of sleep, with lambs on the wall, ‘Good Night’ sprayed opposite the bed and, er, a green goblin in a pixie hat. The odds of having sweet dreams appear to be entirely dependent on where you look…

Getting to the Sorell Hotel Rutli in Zurich, Switzerland

Using public transport: Sorell Hotel Rutli is at 43 Zahringerstrasse. It’s within walking distance of Zurich’s main train station.

More information: Sorell Hotel Rutli

Hotel Kafi Schnaps in Zurich, Switzerland. The Schnapps-themed hotel

The Hotel Kafi Schnaps in Zurich is essentially a coffee shop/ schnapps bar with a few rooms tacked on. In a building owned by a university fencing club (which still practices in the basement), it’s delightfully sketchy and laissez-faire. Go in and ask to see the accommodation, and there’s a high chance that the staff have even forgotten the rooms are there.
But they are, and they’re themed to a ludicrous degree. Each one is based on a different flavour of schnapps. This means that the plum room has little purple cushions bulging randomly out of the wall, while the kirsch (black cherry) one has a carpet designed to look like wood chippings and has pink-rimmed trees painted all over the shop. This is, it seems, regarded as being perfectly normal.
A word of warning – Kafi Schnaps is very much budget accommodation, one step above a hostel. That means a shared bathroom, alas, but who cares when you’re in the only room in the world designed with the Williams Pear as inspiration?

Getting to Kafi Schaps in Zurich, Switzerland

Nearest international airport: That’d be Zurich International Airport then.

Using public transport: Get the regular train in from the airport, then the tram from near the main station. Kafi Schnaps is just north of Zurich city centre.

More details: Kafi Schnaps website

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