La Réserve Eden au Lac Zurich

The Hotel

The Hotel Eden au Lac was built in 1909 by the Zurich architects Streiff & Schindler on the Utoquai promenade — the elegant lakeside walk on the eastern side of Lake Zurich, between Bellevueplatz and Seefeld. The hotel was a fashionable Belle Époque address through the inter-war decades, declined through the post-war period, was acquired by the Zurich Cantonal Bank, and operated as a tired but characterful four-star through the 1990s and 2000s. In 2017 the Reybier family — owners of the Geneva-based La Réserve hospitality group, with flagships in Geneva and Paris — acquired the property and commissioned Philippe Starck for a complete reinvention. The hotel closed in 2017 and reopened in January 2020 as La Réserve Eden au Lac Zurich, the Reybier group's third European flagship after Geneva and Paris.

The Starck conversion is the central proposition. Rather than restore the historic envelope as a faithful Belle Époque reconstruction, Starck took the building's lakeside-resort heritage and pushed it explicitly nautical: the 40 rooms (across eight categories, ranging from 27 to 79 square metres) are designed as the cabins of an inshore yacht — exposed red brick, brass fittings, polished mahogany joinery, soft leather, mid-century modernist furnishings, original artworks, and the hotel's signature blue-and-white striped fabrics throughout. The rooms read as serious individual design objects rather than as a homogeneous five-star programme. Rooms facing the lake — particularly the upper-floor categories — have the most direct Lake Zurich exposure of any city hotel.

The dining is deliberate and ambitious. La Muña — the rooftop restaurant on the seventh floor — runs a Peruvian-Japanese (Nikkei) menu by the Argentinian chef Fernando Trocca, with the most generous lakeside dining setting at any Zurich hotel; the rooftop is open seven days through summer and is consistently among the city's most reliably busy reservations. Eden Kitchen & Bar on the ground floor is the all-day brasserie. The Library Bar — Starck's most photographed Zurich room, with the floor-to-ceiling brass-and-leather library walls and the sculptural cocktail trolley — is the cocktail venue. La Réserve Eden au Lac was awarded a Michelin Key in the inaugural 2025 Michelin Hotels Guide.

The position on the Utoquai promenade is one of the property's central propositions: the lakeside promenade runs directly past the hotel; Bellevueplatz tram interchange is three minutes' walk; the Kunsthaus Zürich (the city's flagship art museum) is two minutes; the Bahnhofstrasse is ten minutes by tram or fifteen on foot via the Quaibrücke and Bürkliplatz. The Spa is small (a fitness room and treatment rooms — La Réserve Eden au Lac is a deliberately compact hotel and the Spa is calibrated to that scale rather than to compete with the Dolder). Service holds the La Réserve standard — the Reybier-family hospitality programme is unusually careful about return-guest recognition, the in-room amenities are above the international five-star average, and the staff-to-room ratio (2:1 — typical of small Reybier properties) is among the highest in the city.

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