Signau House

Panelled in parquet and lit through tall period windows, the rooms at Signau House sit above a villa built in 1912 and restored as a boutique hotel in 2018. Nine rooms and one two-room suite occupy the first and second floors, each individually furnished with a double bed and a rain shower, and no two decorated alike. Light matters here: rooms face either the garden, the quiet Signaustrasse, or the equally quiet Neumünsterallee, and the veranda where breakfast is served looks straight onto the lawn. Downstairs, the public rooms keep their original character — a blue salon with dark walls and a bay window, a green salon under a stuccoed ceiling with a red marble fireplace. The garden itself was laid out by Gustav Ammann for the Froebel family and later rebuilt after decades as a car park; a pond now holds the Froebeli water lily, a variety first bred on this ground. It is a small hotel with an outsized event programme: a dining room seating up to 14, a veranda that takes 28, and a fitted cinema room for 25. You can hear little from the street. Public transport is three minutes away on foot, and central Zürich is close but not underfoot.