Boutique Hotel Restaurant Krone Regensberg

Check your spelling! This isn’t the Bavarian university town, but the Swiss medieval hilltop village, population 489, give or take a few, depending on the season and the time of day. Safe to say there’s only room in town for one hotel like the Boutique Hotel Restaurant Krone Regensberg, and it’s everything you want it to be: a classic timbered building, its exteriors meticulously preserved and reconstructed, but betraying not a hint of the luxe modern interiors that await inside.

It’s belonged to the Schäfer family for decades, and it’s been an inn for the better part of eight hundred years. There’s an architect in the family, who took the opportunity presented by a fire to outfit the interiors in a thoughtful modernist style. The nine bedrooms are simple, spare, and elegant, some in richly figured wood to match the visual texture of the house, others in minimalist white, so as not to distract from the views out the window.

And they don’t call it the Boutique Hotel Restaurant Krone Regensberg for nothing. The Krone’s chef presides over a kitchen that’s one of Regensberg’s main attraction. All told, the experience isn’t a time machine, exactly — both the restaurant and the rooms are quite modern, in their way — but it’s the sort of unique, self-contained hospitality experience that’s more and more difficult to find.

How to get there: Boutique Hotel Restaurant Krone Regensberg is a 22-minute drive from Zürich Airport.