The woman and her personal trainer have the entire pool to themselves and they spend the session treading up and down on an aqua aerobic contraption that looked like murder. I want to ask her if it is okay to wear so many jewels in the water. The diamonds dripping from her arms and fingers – surely it couldn't be good for them? But quite clearly it is good for he her. She is as toned as a racehorse. Meanwhile your correspondent is stretched out on a bed sipping green tea and pretending to read Vogue while keeping an eye on things. I'm in the spa of La Reserve, a resort hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva that prides itself on being luxurious and low-key, even by Swiss standards.
All around me members of the hotel's health club are coming and going for treatments and I too spend an hour being pleasantly rejuvenated with a series of potions and creams developed specially for the hotel, which is part of a small, privately owned group with sister hotels in Paris and the south of France.
La Reserve is a short drive from Geneva airport and at first sights it looks a little ordinary. Low level, redbrick and nothing like the grand hotels lining the waterfront, which reportedly serve up the most expensive lunches in the world (Geneva is top of the international Club Sandwich Index )
La Reserve stands well away from the hurly burly of the city offering, if not absolute convenience to the banks and businesses, then more leisurely stays, which for some residents, apparently, stretch to months.
Families like it, I’m told, for the big gardens and pools, for the winter skating rink and the jungle gym-style kids club. Families stay for long periods while a parent is working in Geneva. In fact there’s a family of four young children in residence right now. The hotel had a suite of bedrooms redecorated for them and the concierge waves them off to school every morning, which sounds adorable and madly expensive, though it may in fact make financial sense in a city where accommodation is so expensive and difficult to secure that many workers live across the border in France.
There are family parties everywhere in the hotel, including in the swish Tse Fung Chinese restaurant, where parents and young children are tucking into the house speciality, a fabulous Peking Duck served in two courses (around €200). Sometimes it’s not business, I’m told. Families come to visit Cern and other attractions such as Geneva’s famous Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, which charts one of the greatest humanitarian projects of the 20th century, reuniting millions of displaced people after the second World War.
For grown-up children, there’s a touch of fascination to the hotel lobby, with its walls of pinned butterflies behind glass, and its wild animal paintings lining long, dim corridors. And then there’s the fantastic chocolate cake. An entire cake awaits you on check-in. I’d planned to have it wrapped so I could take it home, but sliver by sliver it disappeared.
Back in the spa, where there are doctors available to consult on diet issues and other conditions, I watch a mother and her teenage daughter consult a beauty therapist about the daughter’s skin – a subject that was given all the attention that an Irish mother might devote to a CAO application. The girl’s skin – which looks pretty good at a distance – is peered at and tapped and stroked, and examined with a close-up lense, while a 20-minute conversation ensues about what can be done.
Elsewhere, some elderly ladies are whiling away time having tea together in a kind of spa drawingroom with a vaguely space ship feel, and a range of teas and various nuts and fruits on offer.
There’s an entirely different feel at 6.30am the following morning when the gym machines are all occupied by perma-tanned men, presumably gearing up for a day in the city. Or they may be clearing their heads after an evening spent in the hotel’s smoking salon, a dimly lit sanctuary with deep leather armchairs, attentive staff and torpedo-like cigars that can be smoked with impunity thanks to super-efficient ventilation.
Restrained is the word when it comes to breakfast on the terrace, overlooking the gardens and pool. It’s not a place where people pile up their plates at the buffet and spend ages grazing. Most guests have quick coffee, a juice and a pastry and are gone.
The city is less than 15 minutes away by train but we whizz there in the best way possible – by the hotel’s water taxi – a sleek, vintage craft that speeds along past mansions with gardens running down to the water, doing a loop around the city’s famous jet fountain, which is hypnotically huge. The city is modest, with low-key attractions such as its flower clock – a little underwhelming – and a very pretty historic centre around Place du Bourg-de-Four, where you can enjoy coffee or aperitif around an 18th-century fountain. It’s brilliant for people watching and in summer you’ll find one of several outdoor pianos here, so passers-by can rest and play. We pass banks that are private rather than high street, and watchmakers with unremarkable shopfronts but where we’re told they make €1 million timepieces in vault-like workshops out the back.
Even the chocolate shops exude an air of privacy and privilege. My favourite is Faverger, a 200-year-old chocolatier that does a fine line in pralines, and I admire the rows of antique order books that line its museum section.
“There must be a lot of well known names in there”, I say to the manger, thinking of James Joyce, who had stayed in the city briefly and who loved sweets. “I couldn’t tell you,” the manager says. “I have never looked-up names.”
