Basel’s Grand Hôtel Les Trois Rois Gets a Makeover by None Other Than Herzog & de Meuron

✕

The spa is located in the attic. Photo © Jakob Hentschel / Herzog & de Meuron

Together, architect and client devised a program for the neo-Baroque building, a 30,000-square-foot stone-clad steel-and-concrete structure from 1903. The ballroom would become a new restaurant, more convivial and accessible than the hotel’s three-Michelin-starred Cheval Blanc; offices on the floor above would make way for a new ballroom, which, as well as hosting weddings and other events, could be divided into smaller spaces for business hire; the presidential suite would move down to the third floor, where it would enjoy bigger windows and more space (2,500 square feet); four junior suites would fill the fourth floor, while the spa would occupy the attic. Straumann also asked H&dM to build a new smoking room, located adjacent to the bank wing on the ground floor of the main hotel building. While he felt the Trois Rois’ French spirit should inform the feel of the refurbishment, he also wanted something more pop and surrealist, a talking point for Art Basel, the multimillion-dollar mother of all art fairs whose main venue is an H&dM-designed exhibition hall.

1

Spacious rooms (1), including the Suite des Rois (2), as the presidential suite is now known, feature plush furnishings. Photos © Jakob Hentschel / Herzog & de Meuron (1), Kostas Maros (2)

2

“This is a radical approach to hotel architecture,” says Herzog. “Every floor is a totally different world, and it’s not just decoration—it’s acoustically different, the smell is different, the materials are different, and each surface, almost, is an invention.” In the double-height fumoir, where the odor of stale tobacco overwhelms, the theme seems to be Herculaneum the morning after. Within the Stygian gloom of a mud-color lacquered ceiling and burnt-wood walls (for some inexplicable reason milled with an artificial oversize wood grain), monumental fireplace hoods sport hundreds of handmade black-and-red relief tiles, whose combined effect is of a slowly-cooling lava flow. Set against a pentagonal-patterned floor in oak and bronze marquetry, bespoke pentagonal tables and chairs in cherry lacquer and crimson velvet glow like embers in the night. In contrast, the restaurant in the former banking hall is a riot of light and color, with mirrored ceilings and a jungle of chandeliers festooned over stools and banquettes in pink and purple velvet. (In what feels like a nod to Basler Meret Oppenheim, the fabric has crept all over the bell-like table lamps and wall sconces.) Artists Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger contributed the wittily surrealist garden above the bar, a joyous extravaganza of Swiss kitsch that incorporates objects donated by the hotel’s staff, including Muppet figurines, a horseshoe, and a model of dental implants.

Fireplace hoods in the smoking room sport handmade tiles. Photo © Kostas Maros

Brass-and-velvet wall panels are used to divide space in the banqueting hall. Photo © Kostas Maros

In the new banqueting hall, the historic radiator grills have undergone an Alice in Wonderland transposition in scale, their perforations magnified tenfold to form brass-and-velvet wall panels that swing out to become room dividers. For the presidential and junior suites, H&dM developed a common vocabulary of mostly bespoke fittings and furniture that is best described as David Lynch does an Art Deco Milanese brothel. There’s also a touch of hospital-ward kink in the form of heavy-duty curtains that act as room dividers—a way, Herzog says, of giving guests who are not at home agency over their environment. The most conventional interior is the attic spa, which goes full-on Japanese with a profusion of charred-wood slats and timber boards that drowns out the roof frame, which Herzog hated. Here the scent of cedar is complemented by the earthiness of compacted clay, which H&dM used for the walls, in what is apparently an architectural transliteration of Japanese cuisine. “Nothing looks so artificial as Japanese food, yet it’s so natural at the same time, because it’s so immediate,” explains Herzog. “We wanted this immediacy of the smell of wood and earth.”

Even if an interest in surfaces, a penchant for pattern, and references to an artistic and cinematic imaginaire have long informed H&dM’s work, little did one realize they were maximalists at heart! Though the Trois Rois has not disclosed the price tag, one wonders if a tighter budget might have reined in some of the self-indulgence. In the end, though, it’s all a matter of taste: where some will sniff out billionaire bling, others will see a hotel fit for a king.