The art of loving Switzerland  | Advocate Travel | Advocate.com

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The art of loving Switzerland
The Swiss adage “es stimmt” means, roughly, “it fits.” When an Advocate editor goes in search of artistic and architectural delights—and maybe a gay Swiss miss or two—she indeed finds “es stimmt.” What better recommendation for a travel destination? Part 1 of 2
By Anne Stockwell
An Advocate.com exclusive posted January 11, 2006
The art of loving Switzerland

So I’m careening to the airport in Los Angeles, dying for a breath of Alpine calm in Switzerland. It’s quite possible that the Swiss are lunatics behind closed doors, but I don’t think so. This country is blessed with drop-dead scenery in all directions, plus an old-fashioned politesse that seems to blanket the landscape like new-fallen snow. I get the feeling that everything in Switzerland works. “Es stimmt,” they say. “It goes; it fits.” When “it” fits, so do I.

I was here once before, with a rollicking band of gay travel writers, and it was a blast. This time I’ll be following the other path I’m queer for: art and architecture. I’ve also challenged my hosts at Switzerland Tourism: Where are the lesbians in Switzerland anyway? On my last trip with a dozen adorable gay guys, I heard plenty about the hunky Swiss boys. Swiss misses, not so much. But more about that later.

Right now, board Swiss International Airlines Flight 41 with me. My idyll in business class starts with dinner—gravlax to start, then sea bass and bok choy, coffee and cheeses, and a Swiss truffle as a final touch. Wines and liquors flow throughout. What’s more, the biz-class seats on the Airbus 350 let me straighten all the way out and go to sleep. I recline on a slant, like Billie Burke on her lunch break in The Wizard of Oz. But I hit the Continent practically free of jet lag.

Zurich and La Chaux-de-Fonds, Thursday

Landing at Zurich, I take the train to La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the French-speaking region of Switzerland. (In other regions, German and Italian dominate.) It’s our first art and architecture stop. My first-class Swiss Pass is easy to validate, and shortly I’m ensconced in a comfortable, quiet railway car.

Arriving is not challenge-free. I basically know only two French words: merci and beaucoup. And for the first time in this country, there aren’t English speakers everywhere. (I’m not complaining. I sharpened up my charades game.) At La Chaux-de-Fonds’ tiny train station, I say “Hotel Athmos” to a cab driver outside. I know he’s trying to tell me it’s an easy walk from the station, but I can’t decipher his directions. In the end I ride the two blocks in grandeur, arriving just as our Switzerland Tourism guide, Evelyne Mock, is heading out to dinner with the rest of my crew. Over Swiss cuisine at a local restaurant, our group begins to bubble with what will become a most enjoyable chemistry.

My room at the Hotel Athmos is charming and old fashioned—small, but with a lovely duvet, a capacious closet, and a full-size bed cozied up to one wall. Outside, amber leaves drift past the window, and I fall into unconsciousness.

La Chaux-de-Fonds & Neuchâtel, Friday

Downstairs at the Athmos, there’s an abundant buffet breakfast. Can I just say here that bread in Switzerland is a thrill? Add Swiss butter and jam, and the earth moves. A cup of coffee later, we head out.

La Maison Blanche is the first stop on our tour. Built in 1912, this residence on a wooded hill was the first independent project of hometown architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, later known to all of us as Le Corbusier. The house had fallen into disrepair over the years, but a coalition of citizens and professionals from La Chaux-de-Fonds have managed to renovate the house according to its designer’s original plan. We’re there at the ribbon-cutting, and even without understanding the language, I get the civic pride.

La Maison Blanche | Advocate.com
Stockwell at La Maison Blanche under the cobalt blue arches

Jeanneret built the house for his parents, but he was also testing out ideas for himself. He’d studied art before architecture, and at 25 he was already rejecting the sentimental swoops and curls of art nouveau. His passion: clean lines and light. He had ideas about color too. He mixed up the whites and grays outside with arches of eye-crossing cobalt blue. White was good to eat by, he thought; blue, to sleep in. His own bedroom at the Maison he painted yellow: Like Rosie O’Donnell, Jeanneret saw it as the color of creativity.

Now we’re off to a fondue lunch at the local restaurant Auberge du Mont-Cornu, a postcard chalet with great overhanging eaves and nodding red flowers in the window boxes. The fondue pots come out amid a grave debate among our Swiss hosts. What can one drink with fondue? Our local tour guide insists that only wine or hot tea are acceptable. It’s dangerous to drink anything bubbly with the dense melted cheese-and-bread dish. Why? Our guide mimes regurgitating a brick. Um, point taken. “Dangerous fondue” becomes the watchword of the tour.

Our sight-seeing climaxes with one of Jeanneret’s first big jobs. Built during 1916 and 1917, the Villa Turque, or Turkish Villa, now the public relations headquarters of the luxury watchmaking company Ebel, was commissioned as a family residence. An inscrutable brick wall faces the street, pierced only by little round windows. Yet inside, the towering structure becomes a generous chamber flooded with light. I can hardly imagine how radical this soaring retreat would have been in the teen years of the 20th century.

Hotel Palafitte | Advocate.com
Our hotel room floating over Lac Neuchâtel

Le Corbusier—and incidentally, every gay boy I know—would flip over our destination for tonight, the five-star Hotel Palafitte in neighboring Neuchâtel. Built out on pilings over Lac Neuchâtel, it has long, rectangular rooms that are almost like separate little studio apartments—but nicer. There’s a big flat-screen TV; a Bose sound system with six speaker installations. A spa tub set in a bathroom that’s all warm wood planking, like a Finnish sauna. On your sundeck is the lake, and you’ve got your own private ladder down to the water if you want to tie up your rental kayak or just jump in. On the horizon is the Eiger mountain, muscling in on the Jungfrau.

Dinner is gorgeous, served at the Hôtel DuPeyrou, a restaurant housed in an exquisitely repurposed château. Surrounded by tapestries, silks, and parquet, we devour venison, vegetables, and spaetzle, and more of that brown Swiss bread.

Then it’s back to the Palafitte, with its massive king-size bed and steel privacy shutters that clank down at the push of a button (to repel boarders, I guess). Sprawled under the weightless eiderdown, I hear the honk of a duck flying over the lake. Beethoven plays softly on the Bose, and it’s lights out.

Coming in Part 2: Fabulous textiles, the Young Boys of Bern, and a tête-à-tête with Albert Einstein.

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