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If you cannot find Zurich as a beautiful city with a great future, you must learn better again. Once again, it is the Chinese who are investing heavily in the Limmat metropolis.
He is not investing for the rich in Zurich, but for the world’s super rich, who will now find a second seat in Switzerland after Geneva.
He is the longtime owner of the Hotel Savoy Baur en Ville on the world-renowned Paradeplatz in Zurich, the current Credit Suisse Group, which has just placed one of the finest Swiss hotels in the hands of the Chinese Mandarin Oriental Group.
The valuable property was not sold, but was leased.
It’s perhaps the best, but definitely one of the most elite hotel groups in the world, and it’s certainly not a cheap bargain. There is no talk of money in this “big money” world, as was common in old Zurich.
An external sign of this global elitism is the constant decrease in the number of beds in this centrally located hotel favorite of the international monetary elite.
While 170 beds were once offered in a confined space, their number was reduced to 104 beds under SKA CEO Heinz Wuffli (Peter Wuffli’s father).
If the renovation, which begins in early 2022, is to be completed in mid-2024, the noble house will only have 80 beds available to guests.
This is the perfect capitalism: more and more space for fewer people.
Johannes Baur, to whom the Savoy Baur en Ville dates back, was also the initiator of the Hotel Baur au Lac, which was then located on Lake Zurich.
This is typically Zurich: almost 200 years ago it was the Austrians who modernized the city, then also together with the Germans, today it is the Asians. The Chinese in particular.
At the new Mandarin Hotel in Zurich, everything should be bigger, more elegant, more Asian and more global. The prices of the rooms and suites, today already in the highest part of Switzerland, will rise again enormously. For the “happy few”.
For simple millionaires it will be difficult, unless a brave financial yuppie wants to celebrate his fresh money with a new partner.
The true Swiss monetary nobility is very familiar with Mandarin hotels, as this group already offers 44 hotels in 25 countries with more than 11,000 rooms worldwide.
By contrast, the eighty rooms in Zurich are unimportant. But they show that engagement in Zurich counts.
What disappears is a piece of old Zurich culture from the early 19th century. Founded in 1838, 182 years ago, by a man from Vorarlberg who already believed in Zurich at the time, the Savoy en Ville became one of the most important meeting places for Zurich’s financial elite.
Now we can use the elegant bar, one of the most beautiful in the city, one more year. The intern “Orsini”, until recently one of the best Italian restaurants in Zurich, has shown a notable decrease in ambition since the last change of director.
What remains are the exterior fronts. That applies at least for now.
What should stay is the great ballroom, the site of many great conferences, where I have spent thousands of hours over the past decades.
What remains are the United Guilds for Gerwe and Shoemakers. Just as we once enjoyed Chinese dressed in old clothes, our Zoifters may in the future be admired by the Chinese nouveau riche.
Heinz Wuffli, who built today’s Savoy en Ville from scratch in 1975, had to resign a few months before he opened “his” hotel. The SKA branch, Chiasso, had given away two billion Swiss francs in fraudulent Italian money.
Wuffli, whom I served as a public relations consultant, asked me to do the Savoy en Ville opening in style. He himself took a break for a few years before returning to the insurance industry in a glamorous way.
Since then, I have seen the rising and falling stars of the financial center come and go in the “Orsini”. The house was so successful that some time later, Robert Holzach, the president of the former Swiss banking company (SBG), also wanted to have his own hotel and had the “Widder” built, less than a kilometer away.
From the Zürcher Krone, according to Karl the Great, who sits on the south face of the Grossmünster, there was another, another great point has now fallen.
A Mandarin hotel in the heart of the city? For true Zurich residents, this is near the end of the world.
Please forgive me for the repetition: the A-Switzerland of the global successes is happy with the entry of this noble chain.
The large number of B-Swiss billionaires, who for a long time have not been able to take over and run such a house, cry in vain.
The die is cast once again on the World Bank’s Credit Suisse. The old Zurich remains as a facade, the head and the heart are in China.
