Maison Kammerzell (Kammerzell House), Strasbourg

There are two good reasons for visiting the Kammerzell House on the Cathedral Square. The first is because you won’t find a better preserved medieval building in the city and the second is because it has an excellent restaurant on the 1st and 2nd floors.

Kammerzell House was built in 1427 and although it has been renovated several times since and some German Renaissance style was added in 1589, it has kept its essential Late Gothic style and charm.

The restaurant has superb lounges and a choice of three dining areas with stained or mullioned glass windows. Above the restaurant there is a small hotel with nine bedrooms boasting modern bathrooms and fixtures and fittings, but they have heavily beamed ceilings and an air of stepping back in time.

In 1904 the brilliant but unstable Alsatian artist, Léo Schnug extensively decorated the interior with stunning frescoes depicting pastoral scenes, the city at the epoch and characters from German mythology. Léo Schnug died in a mental health institute, as did his father before him. A notorious alcoholic, towards the end of his life, before he was interned, he paid for his drinks with sketches and drawings that must be worth a fortune today.

Léo Schnug was haunted by the hallucination of a cat and if you look carefully at the wall in the restaurant’s alcove on the 1st floor you will find the cat in the fresco.