ADDRESS
LA RÉSERVE GENÈVE HOTEL & SPA
301 Route de Lausanne
1293 Genève Bellevue
Switzerland
ACCOMMODATION
85 rooms and 17 suites
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ARCHITECTURE / INTERIOR DESIGN
Patrice Reynaud
Jacques Garcia
In a park on the shores of Lake Geneva, La Réserve takes you on a fanciful global safari and invites you into the playful indulgence of Parisian hotel interior designer Jacques Garcia.
Together with architect Patrice Reynaud, Garcia transformed the 1970s hotel into an explosion of extravagant colour, secluding shrubbery and revealing glass galleries. A gold leaf trim courses the lobby’s upper wall, below which a frieze quotes philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a native son of the city, with “Back to Nature”. Perched on every standing or mounted lamp are single coloured plastic cut-outs in the shape of parrots and peacocks. A band of leopard-print fabric cuts a horizontal line across lipstick red chairs and creates a vertical border along the red curtains that elegantly partition the lobby. Heralding the entrance to the Loti restaurant is a lifelike elephant poured in plaster. Making its mark is copper elephant’s head that was originally commissioned for the Colonial Exhibition in Paris in 1931 and is now mounted on a wall in the restaurant – where bamboo tied up with leather strips, a cast-iron fireplace and deep brown woodwork define the rest of the decor.
Guestrooms are less ostentatious seeing as their oiled parquet floors create a stage for dramatic drapery, soft velvet bedspreads and black granite and mahogany fittings. Abstract patterned wall hangings and wallpaper are echoed in the choice of woven frames for upholstered seating. The colonial theme is charmingly picked up again by hanging vintage travel photographs on the walls. Limitless in this interior design concept of cultural borrowing, a two-storey high painting by the Russian artist George Pusenkoff – which is a collage of visual quotes from Roy Lichtenstein, Da Vinci, the Japanese craft of woodblock prints and Mies van der Rohe – encapsulates this ethos well.
