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The Laudinella: Origin & History

Lark, the songbird

In the fall of 1956, Hannes Reimann founded the Laudinella cooperative in order to acquire the Hotel Olympia Metropol in St. Moritz-Bad for the Singlager, which was popular at the time. No sooner said than done, so many shares were subscribed in no time at all that the members of the cooperative were able to acquire the hotel, renovate it and open it as Laudinella in June 1957.

The singing also gave the hotel its name. Laudinella is Rhaeto-Romanic and means lark, the songbird. The Laudinella quickly developed into a popular holiday destination for families, those interested in culture, as well as winter and summer sports guests.

The next steps

Soon the Olympia Metropol was too small for Laudinella, and Hannes Reimann started another share certificate campaign to buy the Hotel Engadinerhof next door. This company also succeeded. The Olympia Metropol was dismantled, a new building was built, which was connected to the Engadinerhof, the dining room was converted into a concert hall, music room and a library were set up and the first self-service restaurant in St. Moritz was opened. The Laudinella made holidays in St. Moritz possible even for small budgets.

The goals of the founder Hannes Reimann, to guarantee cultural events in St. Moritz and the operation of a hotel with a good price / performance ratio, have been successfully implemented to this day.

Code word Laudinella

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Hotel Laudinella, author Richard Reich gave free rein to his storytelling prowess. From the real-life experiences a hotel provides day and night, he crafted a series of tales. The novel, Codeword Laudinella, recounts the captivating founding story of the Laudinella during the Singlager era. Together with the illustrations by Markus Roost, it has become a beautiful book. It tells of lovers and the disturbed, of peculiar regulars and obscure hotel ghosts, of eccentric staff such as a gruff hotel furniture maker, an overly imaginative chambermaid, and a four-legged hotel king who prefers to hold court while lying down.
Richard Reich, born in 1961, worked for many years as a newspaper editor covering sports, culture, and society. Later, he founded and directed the Zurich Literature House. He regularly teaches writing workshops for people over 70 at the Hotel Laudinella. Since January 2015, he has been leading the JULL writing lab in Zurich for his "Schoolhouse Novel" project.

Chronicle: 50 Years of the Cooperative

For the 50th birthday of the Laudinella Cooperative, the Laudinella Chronicle, written by Walter Sutter, was published 1956 - 2006. The history of the Cooperative and Hotel Laudinella, which Hannes Reimann published in his volume Laudinella, published in 1981, is presented in a chronologically clear way with a person and subject index - Praise of a seemingly insignificant idea began. Photos from then to the present make this chronicle clear and easy to read.

Walter Sutter, born in 1928, studied electrical engineering and business administration at the ETH Zurich and worked as a production engineer at the Rorschach Aluminum Works, where he was a member of the management team from 1972. From 1970 to 2002 he was a member of the Laudinella Board of Directors.
Hannes Reimann
Laudinella: Praise of a Seemingly Insignificant Idea. Published by the Laudinella Cooperative, St. Moritz, 1981. Printed by Paul Gehring, Winterthur.

Walter Sutter
Chronicle of 50 Years of the Laudinella Cooperative 1956 – 2006 © Laudinella Cooperative, St. Moritz Printed by Kein & Aber Verlag, Zurich, 2007

Film: Cultural and hotel operations

An artistic snapshot of Laudinella's 50th birthday. The film tells of the liveliness and diversity as well as the personal, mostly hidden stories of a cultural and hotel business. Shot by Priska Ryffel and Simone Vogel in collaboration with documentary filmmaker Urs Frey. In front of and behind the scenes of the microcosm 'Laudinella', interviews with guests, members of the cooperative, artists-in-residence and employees were captured in order to illuminate the Laudinella from different perspectives.
27 min, 2007, color.

The DVD is supplemented with a review of Laudinella 1966 from the archive of Swiss television. In the series Unter Uns, Laure Wyss reports on the 10th anniversary of the Engadiner Kantorei and the Laudinella, 39 min, 1966, b / w.

Hotel Reine Victoria

The Hotel Reine Victoria in St. Moritz Bad, decorated in the neo-baroque style, was built in 1875 by Nicolaus Hartmann Sen., resp. Expanded in 1895 by the Zurich office of Chiodera & Tschudy, is an excellent example of the hotel boom in a time of rising tourism. With its figurative decorative paintings, it fits in with the stylistically and technically rich work of the Milanese artist Antonio De Grada (1858-1938).

The figurative and floral decorative paintings are directly related to Zurich villas and Northern Italian sacred buildings. As early as the 1870s, the Engadin was both a point of reference and a place of work for the artist; not least because of his close friendship with his childhood friend Giovanni Segantini. (Art historian Dr. Marc Philip Seidel, Das Reine Victoria in St. Moritz - A showcase hotel in the style of historicism)

Article on the building history of the hotel (from: Piz 51, magazine for the Engadin and the southern valleys of Graubünden.)
BUILDING HISTORY
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