It is a testament to a certain fearlessness when someone asks Herzog & de Meuron to design an eight-room hotel. The Swiss architectural firm has become internationally known for buildings such as the Tate Gallery of Modern Art in London, the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, the Olympic Stadium in Beijing and the Munich Allianz Arena. And now the Bregenz city hotel “Kleiner Löwe” has joined this list – thanks to the perseverance of Lisa Rümmele and Johannes Glatz, two newcomers to the hotel industry.
At first, Rümmele and Glatz – she worked as a journalist until recently, he comes from an old Bregenz family of entrepreneurs – only thought about a home for their own family. But plans for the small house on Kornmarkt, whose roof had burned down in 2013, quickly developed. After all, historically, the city’s population had mostly had access to the building, which is only a few minutes’ walk from the shores of Lake Constance. 200 years ago, the house was built as a brewery that belonged to an inn that has since been demolished. Beer was brewed here until the early 20th century, says Lisa Rümmele. Afterwards, says the 41-year-old, the house housed the city’s first cinema, later a bank, a furniture store, a delicatessen and most recently a nightclub. “After the fire, the house stood empty for a few years. And in September 2015, Johannes was sitting on the square opposite and drinking coffee. That’s when he got the idea.”
Nine years later, only the two upper floors of the five-storey new building behind the original neo-baroque façade are private living space. Below that are two hotel floors with four rooms each. The ground floor offers enough space for the “salon” (a café facing the Kornmarkt), the bar in the middle and the breakfast tables in the back of the room in a continuous but three-part space.
Johannes Glatz is aware that Herzog & de Meuron have designed a number of hotels, but never such a small project: “It is surreal, perhaps even megalomaniacal, to apply to this office of all places,” admits the Bregenz native. Robert Hösl, the architect responsible, knows how the project was accepted nonetheless: “The deciding factor was the interesting mix of tasks: the salon with the opening towards the city, the hotel and, above that, the private apartment.” From an economic point of view, such a design task does not make sense, says the 59-year-old: “The crazy thing is that such a small project requires just as much attention as a large one. But we are always doing research in our office,” he says, giving one of the reasons. Above all, however, the relationship with the clients worked well from the start. And besides, “A small hotel gives you more back than a 50,000 square metre office. It is something personal – to hear that the building owner’s children feel at home in the house from day one.”
A new building was constructed on a plot of land eight metres wide and 23 metres deep. Some of the hotel rooms look down onto the Kornmarkt; the architects cut a generous viewing slit into the façade for this purpose, with the necessary neo-baroque flair to blend in with the existing structure: “We didn’t want a completely new building, but rather kept the façade and didn’t want to show off with new architecture,” says Hösl.
The rooms are only between 22 and 29 square meters in size. Hösl explains that his team spent a long time thinking about the bathroom in particular – and finally installed shower walls that you enter with a twisting motion, like an earpiece: “You can’t make it any smaller, but this way you don’t need any separating glass and you shower almost like you’re in an advertising column.” To find solutions like this, they worked a lot with virtual reality, says the architect: “And with gamer glasses.”
The rooms facing the garden and courtyard face towards Pfänder, Bregenz’s local mountain, and the spires of the Sacred Heart Church. If you’re lucky, you can hear Milena Broger’s dark laughter with the window open. The juror from the ZDF series “Die Küchenschlacht” is often celebrated as Austria’s young culinary hope and has been cooking with her Danish husband Erik Pedersen in the Bregenz restaurant Weiss since 2020. Its new owners had already realized during the construction process that the Little Lion would be too small for gastronomy. When the house on the opposite side of the garden was for sale, Johannes Glatz pounced and leased the restaurant on the ground floor to the cooking couple. Breakfast at the Little Lion is now served by Milena Broger, who even mastered the art of baking croissants for this new task.
In fact, it is the attention to detail that makes this tiny hotel a gem. For the hotel’s own cosmetics line, Rümmele and Glatz work with a well-known Vorarlberg natural cosmetics producer and together created a shampoo with hops: “It’s supposed to be good for hair,” says Glatz, but it also refers to the history of the house, which began as a brewery.
The client sums up: “Friends of ours have repeatedly asked us: Are you even allowed to have a say in the matter with such star architects?” But here the opposite was the case, emphasizes the Vorarlberg native, reporting on discussions on an equal footing. A statement that Robert Hösl promptly confirms: “It’s like a game of ping pong.” In general, however, you often only know afterwards whether the planning is actually correct. “Sometimes you have to live with mistakes.” Lisa Rümmele laughs courageously: “But not here!”