Lark, the songbird

The Laudinella: Genesis

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.

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.

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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.
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Exciting history

Code word Laudinella

For the 50th anniversary of the Hotel Laudinella, the author Richard Reich let his passion for fabulous stories run free. He wrote a series of stories from the real-life materials that a hotel supplies day and night. The novel, code word Laudinella, tells the exciting story of the founding of Laudinella from the Singlagerzeit. Together with the illustrations by Markus Roost, a wonderful book was created.

It tells of lovers and disturbed people, of peculiar regulars and obscure hotel ghosts, of idiosyncratic staff such as a gnarled hotel cabinet maker, an overly imaginative chambermaid or a four-legged hotel king who prefers to hold court while lying down.

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Richard Reich, born in 1961, worked for many years as a newspaper editor in the fields of sport, culture and society. He later founded and directed the Zurich literature house. At the Hotel Laudinella he regularly gives writing courses for over 70 years. Since January 2015 he has been leading his project "Schoolhouse novel“The JULL writing laboratory in Zurich.
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timeline

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.

Hannes Reimann
Laudinella praise for a seemingly insignificant idea
Ed. Laudinella Cooperative, St. Moritz, 1981
Printing: Paul Gehring, Winterthur
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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.
Walter Sutter
Chronicle 50 years of the Laudinella cooperative 1956 - 2006
© Laudinella Cooperative, St. Moritz
Printing: Kein & Aber Verlag, Zurich, 2007
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Culture and hotel business

Movie

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.

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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.
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Built in 1875

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).

Article on the building history of the hotel (from: Piz 51, magazine for the Engadin and the southern valleys of Graubünden.)
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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)
The figurative ones inspire in the elegant theater hall
and floral decorative paintings. 
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"The house from the Belle Époque, of which even many locals were hardly aware of its existence, is an insider tip with a lot of original substance."

Hotel Reine Victoria

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