Riesbach Zurich: Seefeld Lakeside Luxury and Swiss Quality

Riesbach — known to most Zürchers simply as Seefeld, after its most desirable section — is Zurich's lakeside luxury neighbourhood, a collection of streets between the Zürichsee and the Zürichberg hill that combines the finest lake views available within the city limits with a concentration of upmarket restaurants, boutique hotels and specialty shops that attracts the city's wealthiest residents and the international visitors who follow them. The neighbourhood's lakefront promenade along the Utoquai and the Bellerivestrasse provides a walking and cycling route of extraordinary beauty, the lake on one side and the hill's villas and apartment buildings on the other, with the Alps visible on clear days across the southern end of the Zürichsee.

The Zürichhorn park at the neighbourhood's eastern end is the city's primary lakeside recreational space on the east bank — a broad lawn of mature trees, barbecue areas, open-air swimming spots and the moored Zürichsee boats that provide lake swimming from spring through early autumn. The adjacent Heidi Weber House, Le Corbusier's last completed work (1967), is the only building in Switzerland designed by the Swiss-French architect and houses a permanent exhibition of his paintings, tapestries and furniture designs in a glass-and-steel structure of characteristic rationalist beauty. The collection of sculpture along the Zürichhorn promenade, including works by Jean Tinguely and Alexander Calder, extends the neighbourhood's cultural geography to the outdoors.

The Seefeld restaurant scene operates at the premium end of Zurich's already expensive dining spectrum — the neighbourhood's lakeside addresses support some of the finest hotel restaurants and independent fine dining establishments in the city, with particularly strong Swiss and French cooking that reflects the neighbourhood's affluent and internationally sophisticated clientele. The Kronenhalle restaurant, a Zurich institution since 1924 whose walls are hung with original works by Picasso, Matisse, Chagall and Miró given by the artists in exchange for meals during the mid-century era, is not technically in Seefeld but is spiritually adjacent — a restaurant of extraordinary historical atmosphere that represents the Zurich that artists and intellectuals built alongside the bankers and lawyers.