Romantik-Hotel Stern

10 rooms show up on the Hotel Stern's English event pages, and 3 of them are not the hotel's own. Book the Grossratssaal and the request goes to the Kanton Graubünden's own Hochbauamt (its Construction Department). Book the GKB Auditorium and it routes through Graubündner Kantonalbank, the cantonal bank. Book the "Wine-growing museum Chur" and the site names a third partner: "Chur Town Council, Liegenschaftsverwaltung," the city's Property Management Department. Of the 3, only the winepress house carries an explicit invitation: "Attractive historic winepress house, highly suitable for a social function, such as lunch or a wedding reception in the afternoon." It is the only sentence anywhere on stern-chur.ch that uses the word wedding at all. Switch the same site to German, though, feiern.html for celebrations or tagen.html for business, and all 3 rooms disappear. Both German pages stop after the hotel's own 7 spaces; the Grossratssaal, the GKB Auditorium and the winepress house simply are not there. Whatever this hotel's German-speaking guests are told about weddings, it does not include a room the city itself owns.

It would be easy to fold that winepress house into the hotel's own "Tempel," the room the site calls "Romantik Hotels Stern's most solemn room, having been used in earlier days by the Freemason's Lodge." They are not the same space. Tempel sits inside the hotel, 12.4 by 5.7 metres, about 70 square metres under what the site describes as a starred, dark blue vaulted ceiling: block-table seating for 24, 2 rows of 18, a U-shape for 22 and a concert layout for up to 80. The room's own printed floorplan, a PDF linked from the same page, gives the U-shape as 23 rather than 22, a one-person gap between the sales copy (in both languages, checked) and the technical drawing nobody seems to have reconciled. None of that touches the winepress house, a separate building the hotel does not own and only helps arrange access to.

The room the city has owned since 1971

Stern's own page calls it the Wine-growing museum Chur and gives it 2 figures: 50 people at long tables, 70 for a cocktail party or snacks, plus a screen as the only listed equipment. It says nothing else about the building, which is odd only until you check what the building actually is. Chur's Weinbaumuseum sits at Neubruchstrasse 31 inside a Torkel, a wine-press house, built in 1604. Its centrepiece is the largest wine press in the whole eastern-Switzerland region, 14.5 metres long, worked continuously in that building until 1962. The City of Chur has owned the property since 1971. A cooperative formed to turn it into a museum, founded in 1982, though the physical renovation that actually converted the Torkel into museum space ran from 1985 to 1987, 2 different dates for 2 different steps rather than one tidy founding story. None of this comes from the hotel: it is Wikipedia's own account of the building, written with no reference to Stern at all, and it independently confirms the one line that matters for a couple booking a reception there: "events of all kinds can be held in the museum's rooms."

That is the concrete version of "municipal partnership." It is not marketing language for an atmospheric old room; it is a functioning city museum, owned and presumably still maintained by Chur's Liegenschaftsverwaltung, that the hotel has an arrangement to hire out on the city's behalf. The hotel's AGB, its general terms and conditions, still apply to a wedding booked there: unless a couple agrees otherwise in writing, they are obliged to order all food and drink through Stern regardless of whose building the party is standing in, and the same document bans strewing rice, confetti or rose petals indoors or outdoors and rules out sky lanterns, smoke machines and open flames anywhere on the premises the hotel controls. What nobody publishes, on either the hotel's site or the museum's own Wikipedia page, is a per-hour rental figure for the room itself: both instruct a couple to ask, one through Stern, the other presumably through the city directly.

The 7 rooms Stern does own

The rest of the event portfolio is more conventional. The Ratsstube, 15.8 by 5 metres and about 79 square metres, is what the site calls a "Miniballroom" seating up to 100, with a long knights' table configuration for 36. The J. G. von Salis Stube is named for the writer Johann Gaudenz von Salis-Seewis (1762 to 1834) and seats up to 60 for a standing lunch. Smaller still are the Geschirrkammer, decorated with old carriage and horse tack, and the Wiii Egga, a wine corner styled after the region's own Torkel tradition, with an antique basket wine press from 1886 on display at the entrance, unrelated to the far larger one across town. The Alois Carigiet Stube shows original paintings by the Grisons artist of the same name and, on the German pages only, gives a figure for it: up to 40 for an apéro. Churer Stübli seats 11 around a single table.

Downstairs, the restaurant, Veltliner Weinstube z. Stern, serves regional Grisons dishes named on the site itself (Capuns, Maluns, Bizochels, Kalbsleber Dolce brusco, the Churer Ratsherrenteller) and closes only on 24 December. Upstairs on the first floor, the Carigiet Bar runs 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. daily with a Carigiet Spritz and a Stern Negroni among its signature drinks. For anyone who wants to see more of the region than the hotel's own dining room, Stern also runs a restored 1933 Buick as a private-hire experience, out to the vineyards of the Bündner Herrschaft or to a partner restaurant, Alter Torkel, in Jenins.

The hotel itself is a 4-star property at Reichsgasse 11, in the heart of Chur, described on its own site as offering food and wine from the region for over 300 years. That figure is not just the hotel's own claim: Wikipedia's entry on the neighbouring Regulakirche, a Reformed church with no connection to the hotel, independently describes Stern as "the good 300-year-old Hotel Stern" while placing the church next door to it and near the Graubünden Cantonal Library. The current proprietor is Toni Curdin Foppa, and the site's own contact page names 10 hosts and staff individually. Worth noting for anyone reading the small print: the site's own copyright line in the Impressum reads "Romantik Hotel Stern," a different name from the Hotel Stern Chur swiss historic branding used everywhere else on the same domain, including a footer link to swiss-historic-hotels.ch. Both names point at the same address.

What the AGB says about paying from abroad

Stern's AGB, dated Chur, May 2024, addresses a couple planning from abroad directly, in language most Swiss hotels don't bother publishing: "Stern cannot send invoices to countries outside Switzerland. Guests from countries outside Switzerland are requested to make payment in advance by bank transfer or to settle the final amount by credit card." All prices are quoted in Swiss francs including VAT. A group booking of 10 hotel rooms or more needs a confirmed attendee list 7 days before arrival, and an event's final guaranteed headcount is due at least 2 working days ahead, with no charge for trimming numbers up to 5 days out. Cancel an event more than 14 days before it happens and there is no charge; cancel later and the fee is a flat 30% of the lost income, calculated on the guaranteed number, on top of any costs already incurred.

On the legal side of the day, Stern's site is silent. Nothing on the domain names a registrar, a Zivilstandsamt, or cantonal approval for a civil ceremony anywhere, and the winepress-house line is the only place the word wedding appears at all. A couple wanting the legally binding part of the day to happen on site, rather than arranged separately with Chur's own Zivilstandsamt, would need to ask directly; the site simply does not say either way.

None of this makes Stern a dedicated wedding venue in the way a purpose-built château is. It is a working 4-star city hotel that happens to have a formal arrangement with the city's own property office for one of Chur's more distinctive historic interiors, a wine press built in 1604 and still owned by the municipality, and it is worth knowing that arrangement exists before assuming the only room on offer is the atmospheric one upstairs with the star-painted ceiling.