Bürgenstock Resort, Switzerland

PERCHED ON A CLIFF ABOVE LAKE LUCERNE, ‘BÜRGENSTOCK’ HAS BECOME THE LOFTIEST NAME IN ALPINE HOSPITALITY

Words: Richard Brown

Just like every East End boozer has a photograph of The Queen Mother behind the bar, so every great European hotel claims that Audrey Hepburn once stayed there. And, just like you wonder how The Queen Mother found the time to pull a pint in every pub within the sound of Bow Bells, you question how Hepburn managed to holiday at every grande dame from the Baltic coast to the Côte d’Azur. Did she not have a home to go to? Well, for more than a decade, Switzerland’s Bürgenstock Resort was Hepburn’s home.

After marrying her first husband, actor-director Mel Ferrer, at a chapel on the estate in 1954, the glitzy mountain resort became Hepburn’s main residence. Each day, according to legend, Hepburn would drive to a local dentist – although no one seems to know what ailment would require daily visits to an orthodontist. The next highest ranking card a hotel can draw in a game of Iconic Guest Top Trumps is Sophia Loren. Extraordinarily, that other leading lady of cinema’s golden age also lived at the Bürgenstock Resort, moving into a wooden villa near where Hepburn got married with her own producer-husband, Carlo Ponti, and stayed there for seven years. Beat that Tremezzo, Gritti, de Crillon, Le Meurice, et al.

We don’t know if Hepburn and Loren ever fought over sun loungers around the hotel’s lake-facing outdoor pool (given that it’s now known as the ‘Hollywood Pool’, and today looks like the setting of a Slim Aarons photo, we might assume they were regulars). Nor do we know if the actresses ever engaged in a Génépi-fuelled dance-off at the resort’s wood-panelled Spycher nightclub (once a granary, now a private event space). It’d be nice to think that Hepburn was good enough to share some tips on tooth care, but we don’t know that either. What we do know is that neither Hepburn or Loren took a selfie in the spa’s wraparound infinity pool. Smartphones didn’t exist then. Neither did the spa.

Today, you can take as many pictures of yourself floating in the sky as you like, but only between 5pm and 6pm. Such is the Bürgenstock’s staggering situation, straddling a ridge, crocodilelike, 500 metres above Lake Lucerne, that you could, and would, spend the entire day capturing yourself morphing into a human prune. To avoid selfie-sticks at dusk, the resort has had to enforce a phone curfew. And enforce it they will. I was the recipient of a rollicking at five minutes past six. No one told me Yer ’onour, honest!

If it doesn’t feel like you’re staying in a resort that dates back to 1873, that’s because most of it doesn’t. After its sixties heyday, shiny Bürgenstock started to lose its lustre, eventually filing for bankruptcy in the nineties. Swiss investment banks tend not to touch hospitality ventures. Too much risk. Surprising, then, that UBS made a successful bid for the resort in 1996. Less surprising, perhaps, that a decade later, having discovered just how much it would cost to modernise the 148acre estate, that the bank offloaded the site to the Qataris (far less risk adverse, the Qataris). Yet even the owners of Canary Wharf Group and Heathrow Airport nearly cut their losses halfway through a regeneration project that became known in Switzerland as the ‘project of the century.’

Connecting the three-storey spa, one of the largest in the world, to the 10-storey Bürgenstock, the swankiest of the resort’s four hotels, is a glass walkway straight out of Tony Stark’s house. It’s part of a redevelopment that eventually took nine years, 148 building permits and £440 million to get over the line. It opened in August 2017 to include a nine-hole golf course, tennis courts, five pools, 70km of walking and biking trails, and one of Europe’s largest, and most exclusive, luxury medical facilities. Today, psychosomatic therapy, which focuses on mental health, is one of the most popular treatments.

Head sommelier Matteo Rimoldi takes care of a 114-page wine list. He says that for some guests the wine is more of a draw than the spa. Rimoldi stocks 87 types of champagne and 108 different Bordeauxs, including a ’82 Mouton Rothschild (£2,800) and a ’89 Pétrus (£10,075). He doesn’t need to bother with prosecco, he tells us, and keeps his scarce Swiss wines for his favourite guests. Mike Wehrle, the Bürgenstock’s high-spirited Corporate Culinary Director, heads up seven restaurants and a team of 95 chefs. Watching them pirouette around the enormous open kitchen of the hotel’s principal restaurantin-the-sky, Spices, is Swan Lake with black aprons.

Some guests come for the spa, others for the wine. I’d go back for the bath. When outfitting each room, the clever people at London-based MKV Design noticed that the views up here are pretty top. So they had the good sense to stick a tub right next to the bathroom window. To the side of ours was a double-sided glass fireplace, meaning you could look across to flames licking at a stone surround and down to dinky little boats drawing lines on the lake.

You wake in the clouds and lather up in the stars.

Bürgenstock Hotel & Alpine Spa, from approx. £1,200 per night, burgenstockresort.com