Two Swiss hospitality entrepreneurs, Alexandre Emery and Ami Chessex, bought the small Hotel du Cygne in 1881 as Montreux’s tourist trade began to grow along Lake Geneva, and by 1895 they’d formed a company to build something larger. They hired architect Eugène Jost, who completed the new Palace wing in a record eighteen months, and it opened March 19, 1906, joined to the original hotel by an elaborately decorated Grand Hall and music salon.
The Palace was considered thoroughly modern for its time, with electricity, central heating, and private bathrooms with hot and cold running water, features that drew European aristocrats, Russian princes, and American bankers for masquerade balls and Venetian Nights. Both World Wars interrupted the glamour; the hotel served as a hospital for wounded Allied soldiers during the first. On July 20, 1936, five nations signed the Montreux Convention, a treaty governing passage through the Dardanelles Strait, in the hotel’s Salle des Fêtes. Novelist Vladimir Nabokov later made the hotel his home for the last sixteen years of his life.