Struck down by cabin fever

Sensitive architecture and tasteful interiors will have you swooning after these holiday homes in the woods.

Almost all architecture is enhanced by the landscape that it is set in. For proof, one only needs to look to the strickbau (log cabins) and contemporary holiday homes of Alpine Switzerland. Savvy architects here are carefully positioning residences to make the most of striking lake and mountain vistas. As a result, many of these buildings are imbued with a strong sense of place and connection to the wider environment, despite many being cosy winter hideaways, where owners and guests spend their time indoors. Monocle hit the slopes to visit a selection of holiday homes that are making the most of a prime position in the Swiss countryside.

Waterside Wonder – Blausee Treehouses

The first thing that strikes you about the small Alpine lake of Blausee is the vibrant colour of its azure waters. “It’s a trick of the light,” says Stefan Linder, who co-owns the lake and the surrounding nine hectares of land. “The colour is created by the sun reflecting against the forest on this side of the mountain. It refracts against the bottom of the lake and creates this amazing blue.” It’s about as postcard perfect as Swiss scenery gets; a crystalline pool surrounded by mossy green boulders and lush pine forests that sprawl up the towering mountain peaks encircling the lake. 

Blausee’s picturesque qualities have been attracting visitors from around the world to this corner of the Bernese Oberland for more than a century. The land was purchased in 1878 by Swiss businessman Johann Caspar Leemann-Boller, who built a hotel on the lake’s shore and added an alpine freshwater trout farm a few years later. Both are still running; the latter is Switzerland’s oldest producer of freshwater trout and regularly named the country’s finest in taste tests. 

Eight years ago the previous owner was on the search for a buyer. “He was 72 years old and there was nobody in line to take over after he retired,” says Linder. “He asked me to find a solution because there were various interested foreign buyers but he was keen that it stay in Swiss hands.” 

Linder teamed up with fellow entrepreneurs André Lüthi and Philipp Hildebrand to buy Blausee. The lake remains one of only a handful of the 1,500 in Switzerland that is privately owned. Visitors can enter the surrounding park if they pay a small fee, which is put towards maintaining the land and its walking trails. 

Linder has overseen the introduction of a handful of new structures to the park over recent years, including a small lakeside café and shingle-roofed lake house that was designed by Zürich-based architect Thomas Hildebrand. This year the latest addition to Blausee was unveiled; three wooden cabins hidden within a dense thicket of trees that adjoins the hotel. Each cabin can be hired in its entirety by guests who are looking for an experience that will immerse them in the natural landscape. 

Hildebrand is also behind these new structures. Each has vast, floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto the surrounding woodland and, once the leaves have fallen, the mountainsides beyond. “What’s really special is how the views change according to the season,” says Hildebrand, who positioned the cabins to optimise their outlooks. Connecting their inhabitants with Blausee’s spectacular natural landscape was the architect’s main priority when working on the project. “Our daily lives keep moving further and further away from nature and that has created a real longing for it. I wanted to tap into that.” 

For inspiration, Hildebrand drew heavily from his time in Japan. “My partner is half Japanese so we usually go there every year,” he says. “Japanese people have a really spiritual way of connecting to nature and their homes have a more symbiotic relationship to the natural world. In Switzerland, our relationship to nature is more pragmatic. So I wanted to combine those two sensibilities.” The buildings were constructed using locally felled pine wood, which also forms the interior and exterior cladding. For the bathrooms and flooring, Hildebrand opted for the same stone that makes up the mountainsides surrounding the cabins: a deep grey Mitholzer-Kieselkalk limestone sourced from a quarry located a few kilometres up the valley. 

The cabins were decorated by Danish-Swiss interior designer Ruth Kramer, who also runs the Brücke 49 hotel in the mountain village of Vals. She chose the furnishings to complement the views, with a soothing shade of pale duck egg blue for the walls, slate grey and mossy green textiles and wooden furnishings from Denmark’s Carl Hansen & Søn and India’s Phantom Hands. The interiors are warmly lit by lamps from Santa & Cole and Michel Anastasiades, while a wood-burning stove in each cabin adds to the cosy atmosphere. “We wanted to create something calming and timeless,” says Kramer. “To allow people to unplug and give the feeling of being a bit off-grid.”

The cabins were prefabricated by woodworkers in the nearby town of Frutigen and took seven months to construct. Once the foundations were fully prepared, the modular elements were lowered onto the site using a helicopter and slotted together. “This is a really modern construction and wood has come really far with this kind of prefabrication,” says Hildebrand. “That is what I love about these kinds of projects: using local, traditional materials allows you to combine architectural progressiveness with heritage.” 

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