There are some hotels whose location makes them seem like open-and-shut cases. A blazing example is the Villa Principe di Leopoldo in Lugano, Switzerland, a member of Relais & Chateaux. The two-story, Etruscan-orange villa, on the Collina d’Oro (Little Hill of Gold) above Lugano, has a commanding view down the lake, a vista of receding Vs as the bulky mountains here plunge right to the shore line. Every one of the 36 rooms must have a piece of that view, right?
Not quite—and that’s a quirk of architecture. Friedrich Leopoldo von Hohenzollern, brother-in-law of Kaiser Wilhelm II, commissioned the villa in 1926 as a summer residence. To turn the residence into a hotel (opened 1986), two levels of rooms were added at the back of the hotel beneath the terrace. And that’s where things like trees, perspective, and placement come into play.
There are four room categories: Deluxe, Garden Suite, Junior Suite, and Lake Suite. Deluxe rooms, on the ends of the hotel, have no lake view. Garden Suites, on the corners of the hotel, should have a great view, but those mature trees in the garden screen the lake.
At this hotel, it’s the Junior Suites (25 of them) and the two Lake Suites that share the marvelous views of the terrace. The Lake View Suites, in the center of the hotel, are primus inter pares in this regard, but Junior Suite K (rooms are denoted by letters rather than numbers) is no slouch either and costs less.
At a hotel like this, perhaps money shouldn’t be an object. After all, the view is priceless and opening the drapes in the morning is an extreme case of “curtain up”.
But then again, THD can also see booking a Deluxe and getting the view for free from the marvelous terrace. There’s a loggia made for reading and whiling away the afternoon—staring down the lake is a sedative—and a restaurant in a glass pavilion with sliding walls that are opened in good weather. Lemon trees in clay pots give the space the feel of a winter garden. Unlike most restaurants with a view, the food here is superb, and the service old-school in the best sense of the word: a bit ceremonial, very knowledgeable, a staff brimming with savoir-faire.
Lugano is in the southeast corner of Switzerland, a subtropical oasis of palms and pines, but from the hotel terrace one also sees the high Alps, still snow-capped in May. This is the Italian region of Switzerland, known as Ticino, and my capsule take on it is “Italian brio, German organization.” Which is certainly preferable to the opposite.
