A nineteenth-century brewery in Zurich's Enge district, converted into 60 rooms by the Zurich-based studio Althammer Hochuli Architekten, gave B2 Boutique Hotel + Spa one of the more compelling briefs in Swiss hospitality: how to make a former industrial building feel genuinely inhabited rather than merely repurposed. The answer, executed with considerable intelligence, involved leaving the building's civic bones largely intact — the white rendered facade with its arched fenestration reads as municipal rather than domestic — while inserting contemporary hotel life behind them with precision and warmth. The rooms deploy oak flooring, warm-toned timber joinery enclosing glass-partitioned bathrooms lined in bronze mosaic tile, and Tom Dixon Beat pendants hung in pairs above the beds — a leather-upholstered bench in cognac and a vintage swivel chair in dark leather completing a palette that is mid-century in instinct without being nostalgic in effect. The library, surely the hotel's most-photographed interior, lines a double-height former brewing hall with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves carrying thousands of volumes, rolling library ladders leaning against the stacks, and a mix of Jean Prouvé-style café chairs and round marble-topped tables arranged beneath industrial steel-framed windows. Above it all, the rooftop infinity pool — its timber-slatted spa pavilion angled against the Zurich skyline, the Enge church tower visible across the water — makes the industrial conversion feel completely, unhurriedly at home in its city.

No travel notes provided yet.

The B2 hotel is where modernity and history meet. This modern city hotel in the former Hürlimann brewery impresses with its unique sense of style, unmistakable architecture and an innovative concept which brings people together. All that right in the centre of Zurich.