Rooms Are Magical at an Unusual Swiss Hotel

Reserving a room at a hotel ordinarily requires no Houdini skill or sleight of hand, but checking in at the Magic Casino Hotel here beats anything yet.

For starters, guests have a choice of 20 rooms different from each other. Each is in a decor that pushes an original theme--the Western Saloon Room, China Room, One-Armed Bandit (Las Vegas) Room, Coca-Cola Room, Pinball Room, Saturday Evening Post Room, Louis XV Room, the duplex Wedding Suite and the Hollywood Room.

If you book the Hollywood Room be prepared to spend the night with statues of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe (the latter is sculpted from the famous pinup poster). If you book the One-Armed Bandit Room you can play any one of half a dozen coin machines that line the room.

Stories on the Wall

In the Saturday Evening Post Room you may want to read articles or short stories printed in the Post during the 1930s that now appear as slick wallpaper.

In the Coca-Cola Room your pillows and bed sheets bear the blown-up familiar trade label of the American soft drink, while the telephone is the exact shape of the famous hour-glass bottle.

Upon entering the Western Saloon Room, which is laid out as a kind of Western hangout, you push open the swinging half-doors and bang!--you are confronted with an armed cowboy who is ready to shoot, “High Noon” style, provided that you don’t shoot him first with the rifle hanging on the wall.

The Erotic Room, with its sexy water bed and mirror on the ceiling, is high on imagination and . . . beyond description.

Winding Stairway

The upstairs/downstairs Wedding Suite’s winding stairway takes you from the living room, which has a kitchen/bar, up to the bedroom, where stands what is probably the biggest covered brass bed in captivity.

Because the Magic Casino Hotel is a relatively new enterprise, all the rooms--no matter what theme--are equipped with color TV, radios, telephones and modern bathrooms. Open all year except for July, the hotel has single rooms for 65 Swiss francs (about $49 U.S.), doubles for 110 francs and the Wedding Suite for 200 francs. All prices include breakfast.

Part of a much bigger layout, the hotel runs a dinner revue in which magic and magicians are interplayed with songs, chorus girls, emcees and comics in a lavish theater that highlights the world’s largest self-playing dance organ.

Roving Magicians

During dinner two roving magicians will come to your table to do a couple of mystifying tricks right under your eyeballs before the stage show begins.

The event costs 148 francs and includes a five-course meal, 90-minute stage pageant, dancing until 1:30 a.m. and a concert by the Taj Mahal dance organ.

The imposing organ with the grandiose name survives as the largest, most ornate automatic musical instrument anywhere. Measuring nearly 26 feet wide and 20 feet high, its decorative front features a delicately carved statue of a larger-than-life goddess emerging from a bath with a robed angel blowing a trumpet.

The overall architecture of the organ is that of a castle with domed minarets supported by elaborately carved columns. Blazing with 1,000 lights, it comes alive with 700 organ pipes, a xylophone, drums, castanets and a huge temple bell. The mammoth music maker dishes up pieces ranging from the “Beer Barrel Polka” and “Tennessee Waltz” to “My Wild Irish Rose,” “When the Saints Come Marching In” and “Dixie.”

By arriving early or staying over a few hours the next morning, you can inspect the Magic Casino complex, a collection of five museums, each featuring a special aspect of the world of magic. A guide will take you around and explain things in English, or you can do it alone.

What comes over strongest in each of the museums is the nostalgic spell that covers specialties like Automobilia, Cinema, Automated Dolls and Puppets, Famous Freaks of Yesteryear and Ventriloquism. Quite a few of the 3,000 exhibits work when you press a button, while hidden loudspeakers provide sound and explanations (in German).

The mastermind behind Degersheim’s Magic Casino is Retonio Breitenmoser, who made his living for 20 years as a magician and ventriloquist.

Home of the oddball hotel is Degersheim, a picturesque farming town of 3,000 about half an hour by car or train southwest of St. Gallen near the Austria and Liechtenstein borders. It’s not far from Appenzell, which many Swiss people say is their most typical Swiss village.

For bookings in the Magic Hotel and/or its Dinner Spectacle Revue (Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays), write to the hotel at 9113 Degersheim, Switzerland.