Ascona is an elegant diva. The promenade runs along Lago Maggiore in pastel houses and ice-cream queues. A short walk from the piazza, behind a line of palms, stands Hotel Eden Roc. It reopened recently, lighter than before.
The old frosted-glass balustrades are gone. The designer behind the refit, Carlo Rampazzi, replaced them with clear glass, and windows that run close to floor and ceiling. Corner rooms get two balconies: a small one for the morning coffee, a wider one for the evening drink. Neither tries too hard.
Inside, beds face the water rather than the television. From the pillow, you can watch a boat cross the bay. The rooms keep out of the way — timber floors, a desk, little else. Only the beautiful lake in front of you.
Outside, lawns run through the palms down to the shoreline, pools set at intervals along the way. There is a beach, in the loose Ticino sense of the word: sand, shade, a few loungers turned towards the water. In one corner, an old artist’s house holds a rotating exhibition.
A small jetty marks where the day tends to get more interesting. The hotel keeps a handful of boats, including one guests can take out alone for an hour, no licence needed. For anyone who would rather not dock it themselves, there are wooden speedboats with a driver, engine idling low as it noses past the swimmers.
Better still is the sail. We went out on the hotel’s own sailboat, skippered by a captain who told us why a jetty had been rebuilt three times, who still fishes the lake at dawn out of habit rather than need.and how the shore line changed over the years. Ascona settling into a low strip of colour behind you, and the sense of the lake as somewhere people, not just tourists, actually live.
It is the kind of detail the Tschuggen group seems to collect. At Carlton Hotel in St. Moritz we joined the group’s Moving Mountains programme and found the same instinct at altitude — snow instead of sail, but the same habit of handing guests a story rather than a schedule.
Dinner is at the Lakehouse, La Casetta, a former boathouse set at the water’s edge, tables lit low, the day’s catch still laid out on ice at the counter. The kitchen is Italian and authentic: handmade pasta, a spread of antipasti, and fish that needs nothing more than the grill and a squeeze of lemon — the best we ate anywhere on the lake. Sun still on your skin from the afternoon’s sail, it tastes like something earned.
