Insider tip in Zurich: Staying at home can be great cinema

Some people like hotels where you can be seen.

And there are people who like hotels where you are not seen.

If you know where the entrance to the underground car park is at Signaustrasse 6 in Zurich, you can move into these more than hundred-year-old walls completely unnoticed.

It is a very Swiss house: discretion is written in large invisible letters above the freshly washed sky over Seefeld.

A gentle feeling of home sets in when the key is handed over.

Breakfast is served in the paneled dining room or on the checkerboard-tiled veranda;

the herringbone parquet creaks pleasantly, a sweeping staircase leads to the rooms.

The salon and the fireplace room are available to all guests of the house around the clock, only there is no night porter;

you should remember the code for the front door.

This is a quiet residential area behind the eastern shore of Lake Zurich, a bit like being in the country.

The impression is no coincidence: at the beginning of the 19th century, the area was dominated by agriculture before the owners started to set up real estate companies, develop and subdivide their estates to create villa quarters.

The regulations were strict: noisy, air-polluting, flammable and immoral trades were forbidden.

Grocery merchants, coffee barons and textile entrepreneurs had their summer homes here.

Many Swiss are familiar with this idyllic world, from the "Turnachkinder" books, which tell of the cheerful life on Lake Zurich in the mid-19th century.

They belong to the frog family!

The listed Villa Syz in Signaustraße was built in 1912 on behalf of the silk manufacturer Georg W. Syz.

After it had been used as a film distribution office building since the 1960s and the garden disappeared under a parking lot, it is now the other way round: "Signau House & Garden" - a small, fine bed & breakfast with nine double rooms and one suite - has moved in here, For three hundred francs a night, everyone can now pretend to live in English country house style on Lake Zurich.

Here, opposite the French Consulate General, you can calmly prepare for an important performance, write a book, gather your family or retreat before or after a medical procedure: a number of specialist clinics are not far away.

You can't see the lake, but you can see the lovely garden: a pair of blackbirds are busy hacking at the lawn, every now and then a chaffinch darts through the picture;

even a great spotted woodpecker has to do here in the area again and again.

Otherwise you can see: perennial beds, a water mirror, a small pavilion, framed by old trees.

Trellises of fruit adorn the sun-facing facades;

the water lilies in the shallow basin are reminiscent of the original horticulturist Froebel, who bred these very Froebeli water lilies.

The Signau-Haus looks otherworldly, but you can be at the opera house in ten minutes.

Feldeggstraße bends down to the lake, past shops that perhaps only exist here: La Guadalupana, where there are exclusively Mexican products, tamales and mole, tequila and chayote.

A few meters away, top performers and those who don't need to be top performers meet at Monocle to enjoy croissants with a view of high-performance rain jackets and hand soap from South Tyrol, thirty euros a bottle.

There are tennis hats that can also be used as umbrellas, because rain is more common in Zurich.

Theodor Mommsen, who wrote the first two volumes of his Roman History on the Limmat, was very annoyed by the constant rain and by not being particularly valued in the city, either as a scholar or as a German.

A stone's throw from the Monocle is the parental home of Zurich artist Gottfried Honegger, who left it to his friend Max Frisch in the late 1950s.

The author lived there with Ingeborg Bachmann, who Honegger recalled was a good housewife.

As such, she brushed and beat carpets in the backyard.

"The only mishap was that she satisfied her desire to clean up on Sunday mornings and then in a flying dressing gown.

The holy Sunday.

Woman in a nightgown and a concubine at that - that was too much of a bad thing.

A phone call to the police was enough to get my father to take action.” Father Honegger immediately kicked the poet couple out.

The Signau house has a long cinematic tradition: two of the owners produce for cinema and television, including “Journey of Hope”, the second and last Swiss film to win an Oscar, more than thirty years ago.

The film, based on a true story, is about a poor Turkish family with many children who sell everything for a better life in Switzerland.

They were abandoned by smugglers, a child died in a snowstorm on the Splügen Pass, and the family was turned away at the border.

The renovation was also used to bring the cinema room up to date.

The cinema now has 25 seats, an exclusive address that not only Martin Scorsese and Roland Emmerich know.

And walking down the street from Haus Signau towards the lake on a hazy day, it seems as if the haze enshrouds many other stories that played out in these streets and behind these facades with that fine veil of mystery and elegant invisibility, so typical of this discreet place.