The hall smells like a toilet

In 2011, a hairdresser and her mother in Lucerne began a nightmare that lasted more than a decade. It’s about shattered hopes, too many hearts and souls, and something that smells like heaven. Or as Katrin Landolt (62) puts it: “It’s about the powerlessness of the small against the omnipotence of the big.” And about how a simple solution eliminates a big problem.

In the spring of 2011, her daughter Anja Schmid, 32, returned to Switzerland after a language course in London. Trained hairdresser dreams of her own business and sets out to find a suitable place with her mother.

empty words

The duo found what they were looking for in Lucerne at the Lakefront Center, just behind the cultural and convention center. A large residential and office complex that also houses a hotel. The realtor raves about the location, the proximity to the hotel, the international guests, the large number of employees – all potential clients waiting for a barber shop to finally open in the neighborhood. Many promises that soon turned out to be false.

Instead of questioning, the mother and daughter believe and rent an empty commercial space not far from the hotel entrance. In a matter of weeks, they’re turning it into a sophisticated hair salon with a lot of passion and attention to detail. “We had to build everything ourselves,” Anja Schmid says in an interview with Blick. “All plumbing, sprinkler and ventilation for water and electricity.”

looking in the wrong place

When the shopkeepers leave, the expected customers do not come, but the stench comes. Especially on hot days, “Budeli” smells of feces, as the two affectionately call the shop. “It was unbearable, I had to close shop for days,” Anja Schmid recalls. The hairdresser bursts into tears when customers cancel their appointments because of the smell. Money is running out, loans need to be repaid.

All of the two women’s complaints are in vain, with the landlady, a local real estate company, and management continuing to brush them off. The smell remains. Unfortunately, a home technician suspects a problem with the vent, but the vent is working perfectly. For more than ten years, people have been looking for the cause of fecal odor in the wrong place!

The property is owned by Credit Suisse

Desperate, the two women contact the property owner, Credit Suisse. Lakefront Center belongs to the portfolio of a CS real estate fund. “We wanted to appeal to the moral responsibility of the big bank,” says mother Katrin Landolt. An e-mail sent in 2014 to Urs Rohner (62), the Chairman of the Board of Directors at the time, was answered politely but without any obligation. It’s no wonder: at the time, Rohner had other concerns than meeting the needs of a hair salon, with billions in fines and a “clean slate” in the US dispute.

The principal tenant is usually responsible for disputes with sub-tenants. That’s why the bank doesn’t feel responsible for the smell. Until CS-Immobilienfonds takes over all rental contracts directly in the spring of 2021. Two women paint a new hope. Former CEO Thomas Gottstein (58) and CS President Axel Lehmann (63) are now also receiving registered letters from Lucerne.

a simple solution

But another year, the smell of sewage passed through “Budeli”. But as CS approached this year’s plenary, things started to get heated, and the two women stepped up the pressure: “If I don’t make a phone call, I’ve copied all of the decade’s correspondence several times over the next few days, and if CS is asked to come to an ostensibly fair deal, I can’t help but I can get help elsewhere. I am confident that I will get it very shortly before the General Assembly,” says Anja Schmid in a registered letter to the bank’s senior management in April 2022.

Even though CS denied any direct link to AGM when asked by Blick, it all happened suddenly at the time. In June, two real estate professionals from the bank visit “Budeli” and offer plumbing on the same day. In the back room, he finds an unused but poorly sealed stool pipe that ends in the building’s sewer system. With a simple filter for a few francs, the pipe is odor-proofed. After that day, not a single smell came out of Anja Schmid’s “Budeli”. And CS apologized “in every way”.