Fairmont Le Montreux Palace

Vladimir Nabokov arrived at the Montreux Palace in 1961 intending to stay a few months and never left. He wrote Pale Fire and Ada in a sixth-floor suite overlooking Lake Geneva, hunted butterflies on the slopes above the town, and died in 1977 still a resident. A bronze of him, seated with one leg crossed, has sat in the garden of Fairmont Le Montreux Palace since 1999.

History

The hotel opened on 19 March 1906, built in under a year by the architect Eugène Jost, who had already designed Lausanne's Palace and the Caux Palace above Montreux. The town was the Riviera of the Swiss, with a mild lakeside climate and a rail line along the shore, and the Palace was its largest and most ambitious hotel. The guest list of the first decades ran through European royalty and American money, interrupted by the two wars.

The Montreux Jazz Festival, founded by Claude Nobs in 1967, has used the hotel as its headquarters and the lodging of its musicians for most of its history. The avenue outside was renamed after Nobs following his death in 2013, which is why the address is now Avenue Claude Nobs 2. Fairmont took over management of the hotel, and the Swiss federal inventory lists the building as a cultural property of national significance, the highest category.

Architecture and design

Jost's building is Belle Époque at its largest: a long facade of pale stone with corner towers and mansard roofs, running parallel to the lake across a garden. The Salle des Fêtes, the ballroom, keeps its painted ceiling and gilded plasterwork and is the centrepiece of the public rooms. The Petit Palais, a separate building beside the main hotel, was added in the 1920s and houses function rooms. The interior was comprehensively restored through the 1990s and 2000s, with the public rooms brought back to their original scheme.

Rooms and suites

The hotel has 236 rooms and suites across the main building and the Petit Palais wing. Lake-facing rooms look over the garden, the promenade and the water to the Savoy Alps; the rooms behind face the vineyards of the Lavaux slopes. Interiors follow a classic scheme with period mouldings, and the suites on the upper floors keep their original proportions. A suite is named after Nabokov.

Dining

The Montreux Jazz Café, in the hotel, serves an all-day menu around the festival's archive of music and photographs. La Palmeraie is the main restaurant and the setting for breakfast, under a glass roof with palms. Funky Claude's Bar, named after Nobs, has live music in the evening and stays open late during the festival. The terrace in the garden opens in summer.

Wellness

The Willow Stream Spa covers 2,000 square metres and includes an indoor pool, an outdoor pool heated for use in the colder months, saunas and steam rooms, a fitness centre and treatment rooms. The outdoor pool and its deck look across the lake.

Weddings and events

The Salle des Fêtes is the principal room for wedding dinners and galas, and the Petit Palais holds a set of meeting and banquet rooms used for congresses, which Montreux hosts year-round at the convention centre on the lakefront nearby. Weddings use the garden for ceremonies when the weather allows and the Salle des Fêtes or La Palmeraie for dinner. The hotel also hosts the festival's own events each July.

Location

The address is Avenue Claude Nobs 2, 1820 Montreux, on the Grand-Rue parallel to the lakefront promenade. The Freddie Mercury statue on the lake is a few minutes along the shore, and the convention centre, the 2m2c, is beside it. Montreux railway station, on the Lausanne to Brig line with direct trains to Geneva airport in about 75 minutes, is five minutes uphill on foot. Chillon castle is 3 km along the lake, and the GoldenPass line to Gstaad leaves from Montreux station. For a luxury hotel in Montreux it is the one the town's whole calendar, musical and corporate, revolves around.