Auberge Aux 4 Vents - The Swiss Hotel Where You Can Take a Bath Outdoors - From the Second Floor

Between Fribourg's medieval rooftops and a park full of century-old beeches, a renovated 17th-century manor is doing something quietly remarkable. Auberge aux 4 Vents is not a boutique hotel in the algorithmic sense - all reclaimed wood and oat milk. It is something older and stranger: a patrician country manor turned auberge, sitting in a four-hectare park on the edge of a medieval Swiss city, stuffed with contemporary art and animated by a genuine curatorial obsession. It was fully renovated in 2025, and it has emerged from that process sharper, more coherent, and more interesting than before.

There's a bathtub at Auberge aux 4 Vents that travels. Press a button in your room, the window swings open, and the tub - golden, absurd, magnificent - slides out on rails over the park below. You can soak there, suspended above the gardens, looking out at the old city of Fribourg and the Pre-Alps beyond. It is, by any measure, one of the stranger ways to have a bath in Europe.

Location

The auberge sits in Granges-Paccot, effectively on the northern doorstep of Fribourg - a city that most travelers to Switzerland still somehow overlook, despite its extraordinary Gothic cathedral, its network of medieval covered bridges, and its position straddling the country's French-German linguistic fault line known as the Röstigraben.

From Fribourg's main train station, you can reach the hotel by bus (line 1 toward Portes de Fribourg, alighting at the Poya stop, then a 10-minute walk) or from the smaller Fribourg Poya station, also a 10-minute walk.

The hotel also sits within easy reach of several walking and cycling routes, and keeps bikes available for exploring the surrounding countryside. Murten, Gruyères, and Bern are all within 30 minutes; the Alps are just over an hour away.

A Manor with a Long Memory

The building dates to the late 17th and early 18th centuries, originally constructed for a patrician family as a country residence. It was one of roughly thirty such manor houses and small châteaux that formed what was known as the "golden belt" of Fribourg under the Ancien Régime - a ring of aristocratic escapes ringing the city. The wealthy de Boccard family used it as a summer residence and hunting retreat.

Ownership passed through several aristocratic families over the following centuries before the estate was acquired in 1958 by Robert Burrus, a cigarette manufacturer, who lived there with his wife and their eight children until his death in 1996.

In 1997, Res Balzli purchased the estate and, together with Catherine Portmann, transformed it into a hotel and restaurant - Auberge aux 4 Vents - which opened in 1998. In 2019, the property was donated to the Fondation Pays des Merveilles. The foundation undertook a comprehensive renovation completed in 2025, commissioning artist and scenographer Olivier Suter, working alongside architect Justine Prin, to guide the process.

Their brief was essentially archaeological: to strip away what Suter described as "this hybrid accumulation of centuries" and find coherence in an 18th-century base. Working with the State of Fribourg's cultural heritage department, they studied comparable manor houses from the period to reconstruct what an aristocratic home of this type would have looked like - since no original architectural documentation survived.

New baseboards, reworked lighting, restored floors and woodwork: the building was effectively rebuilt from the inside as a unified composition. Suter's phrase for the result is apt: "We made something like a large painting out of this place."

Since 2020, the auberge has been operated by tenants Philippe Roschy and François Baumann, who also run several other establishments in Fribourg, including La Brasserie Le Boulevard 39, Hotel-Restaurant Le Sauvage, Hotel-Restaurant Alpha, and a butchery. Roschy serves as president of GastroFribourg; both are involved in Hôtellerie Fribourg, Terroir Fribourg, and Fribourg Tourisme. Their investment in the place is, in other words, not incidental.

The Sculpture Park

The park is one of the more quietly extraordinary things about 4 Vents, and it would be easy to underestimate it. Four hectares (roughly 10 acres) of formal French garden, orchard, and descending woodland that slopes down to the Sarine River and Lake Schiffenen. The estate's oldest trees include two enormous beeches - from the Latin fagus - which gave Grandfey its name. A public footpath crosses the grounds, meaning the park belongs, in a small way, to everyone.

Scattered through it are several sculptures commissioned specifically for the site. Jürg Hoffmann, known as Gamelle, contributed Feuer Kugel (Fire Ball) in 1999: dozens of welded tools set on a metal base, which reads as abstract assemblage by day and ignites into a glowing fireball at night.

Sculptor Res Freiburghaus is represented twice: his Findling (Erratic Block, 2000) stands at the entrance, contrasting the rough surface of a glacial erratic from Upper Valais with a single polished band that reveals the stone's deep black interior. Deeper in the park's western section, near a dog cemetery created by a former owner for her pets, two monumental stone women by the same sculptor mark the entrance.

Sonia Bischofberger, artist and glassblower, made Attrapeur d'air (Air Catcher, 2001), a kinetic piece mounted above the restaurant entrance that reaches toward the sky and rotates in the wind. And overlooking the pool, Luciano Andreani's Château de la Plätch (2002) is an allegorical fountain work with figures on a colonnade of rusted steel, its surfaces now green and absorbed into the surrounding vegetation - evoking, per the original commission, life and death simultaneously.

There is also a pétanque court, a pavilion tucked into the woods, and, in season, what the hotel describes with some understatement as rumors of native orchids thriving in the grounds.

The Restaurant

The restaurant was awarded a Gault et Millau listing in 2024. Chef Axel Voegelé and his team run a kitchen oriented toward local and seasonal products - specifically the terroir fribourgeois - without tipping into the kind of reverent locavorism that can make dinner feel like a geography lesson.

The weekly menu rotates with the seasons: a recent spring offering included asparagus ravioli with truffle sauce and wild mushrooms, and a salmon trout fillet with apricot-raspberry sauce vierge and semolina with grilled vegetables.

The à la carte menu runs from tuna tataki marinated in sake and a beef tartare with house-made pesto, to a beef fillet Rossini with sauce Périgueux and a roasted cauliflower with sautéed morels for those eating plant-based. Desserts lean into local dairy: meringues served with double cream from the Mouret dairy, a blanc-manger with Madagascar vanilla and Gariguette strawberry soup, and a warm chocolate cake using chocolate from Villars, a Fribourg-based maker.

The Rooms

The main manor house contains seven rooms, each individually conceived as a distinct artistic environment. The 2025 renovation gave them a unified base - restored floors, consistent lighting, period-appropriate detailing - while preserving, and in some cases deepening, their individual identities. Each room opens onto the park.

A separate structure on the property, La Dépendance - a slightly later addition to the estate, also listed as a cultural heritage property, making eight options in total - sleeps four across two floors, with its own kitchen, private entrance, and a garden a short distance from the pool. It suits families or groups wanting their own space. Breakfasts, included in the room rate, feature local produce and in warmer months are served in the garden.

Le Bouquet

Le Bouquet is a large, well-lit room facing the park, the cathedral of Fribourg, and the Pre-Alps - a view that manages to compress several centuries of Swiss architecture into a single frame. The artistic work here is by Isabelle Krieg, a Fribourg-born artist who has, since 2019, maintained a single evolving bouquet in her home. Each week she adds new flowers, removes what has wilted, and photographs the arrangement.

The room's walls and windows carry 157 of these photographs - three years of still lifes cycling through seasons, acting as a slow mirror to whatever is currently blooming in the garden outside. It is a room about time passing in a gentle and accumulative way, which turns out to be a surprisingly good atmosphere in which to sleep.

La Culottée

On the second floor, La Culottée faces west toward the Jura and catches the sunset. Its defining feature is a monumental wallpaper by Geneva-based artist Delphine Reist, which at first appears to show oversized flowers. On closer inspection, the stems resolve into abstract, enlarged women's underwear, and the lace at the top of the composition suggests petals and stamens. It is playful and deliberately ambiguous - erotic in the way that good symbolist imagery tends to be: only as explicit as you allow it to become. The room is named, appropriately, after French slang for a woman who does as she pleases.

L'Orchidée

L'Orchidée is a spacious room with a Bernese wooden floor and a working fireplace, its windows looking out over the park toward the Jura. The wallpaper is the work of Christiane Hamacher, whose starting point was a fascination with Europe's centuries-long obsession with orchids.

She photographed wild orchid species across Switzerland, then fed those images through artificial intelligence, which analyzed and reassembled the flowers into something synthetic and dreamlike - close to abstraction, botanical only in its source material. A shelf in the room holds additional documentation on the project. And somewhere in the park below, native orchids are apparently making themselves at home.

La Belle Étoile

La Belle Étoile is generously proportioned and south-facing, offering views of Fribourg's Old Town and the Pre-Alps. It has a beautiful tiled stove, good natural light, and - should you want it - the most eccentric bathing experience currently available in the Swiss hotel industry.

The bathtub was installed at the auberge's opening in 1998 by Fribourg artist Olivier Suter (the same person who led the 2025 renovation), with technical assistance from Serge Crausaz.

The mechanics are straightforward in the best possible sense: press a button, the window opens, and the bathtub slides out on rails over the park.

You are now outside, above the gardens, in a bath. The system is fully automated. It works in daylight or at night, which changes the experience considerably - daytime offers the panorama, night offers something stranger and harder to categorize.

The outdoor pool sits in the heart of the park, enclosed by the estate's vegetation and hidden from view - shielded enough to feel genuinely private, which is not always easy to achieve when the grounds are crossed by a public footpath.

Given that the park also contains a working pétanque court, woodland paths leading down to the Sarine River, and a set of sculptures worth spending time with, it is entirely possible to spend a full day without leaving the grounds and feel that you have done something worthwhile.