Luxury escorts in Winterthur

Winterthur built locomotives and bought paintings, and both legacies are still the town. The industrial fortunes of the Sulzer and Reinhart families endowed a museum landscape out of all proportion to the city's size: Oskar Reinhart's collection at Am Römerholz — Cézannes, Renoirs and Goyas hung in his own villa above the town — is one of Europe's great private galleries, and the Kunst Museum and Fotomuseum carry the habit on. For guests whose Switzerland is cultural rather than alpine, Winterthur is the connoisseur's afternoon.

The town beneath the collections is easy company: the largest car-free old town in the country, café terraces the length of the Marktgasse, and the converted Sulzer works — brick halls now holding restaurants and studios — giving the evening an industrial-romantic register Zurich has largely priced away. Our engagements here are often gallery-first — a private hour at Am Römerholz, dinner in the Altstadt after — and suit guests staying in Zurich who want an evening outside it; the trains run past midnight and the drive is twenty minutes. Companions speak German and English, and know the collections well enough to enjoy them.