The hotel, in harmony with its forested location

Tucked above the village of Sils, the Waldhaus hotel offers a blend of natural beauty and 20th-century design. A LUX editor reflects on their retreat, where the surrounding forest and timeless atmosphere offers a sanctuary for artists and wanderers alike

Waldhaus literally means “forest house” in German and, if you walk out of the grand doors of the Waldhaus hotel perched on a rock above the tiny village of Sils, turn left along the path leading through an ancient larch and pine forest and disappear along the mountain slope, you could walk for days without ever emerging from the canopy of the forest above and the humus of the ground below. It is a near-infinite ecosystem of fungi and plants that work in one with the trees, insects and animals to keep this great Alpine forest alive.

A framed view from the Rock Room

You could, in theory, walk for thousands of kilometres circumnavigating the Alps and never emerge from the forest. But that would be a shame, as the Waldhaus, which opened in 1908, is itself just so delicious.

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Unlike some grand Swiss hotels, this is a creative and authentic tribute to 20th-century design, its interior architecture genuinely and lovingly created by generations of owners.

A game of tennis, Waldhaus Sils-Style

It is made to be at one with the forest and many of its picture windows look not over and out of the woods, but inside them, framing them like a Jasper Goodall photograph. The Waldhaus is where writers and artists, including some of the most celebrated in the German-speaking world, have come for generations to relax and be inspired.

It is a hotel as imagined by a poet, the service just formal enough but never oppressive, the food never showy but perfectly made from local ingredients, including a nightly bouillon – always made with a different stock – that is a demonstration of how clear soup is a tonic for the soul.

A space where 20th-century design meets timeless creativity

The hotel, which has 140 rooms and suites, is neither a summer nor a winter resort: it is a place to disappear to and be inspired, whatever the season, and if you wish to vanish up the beautiful hidden valleys of the Engadine above on a summertime walk, or spend the day in winter sports in some of the celebrated mountainsides of adjacent St Moritz, you can.

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This is a place for artists – visual, musical, literary – first and foremost. It would never be so gauche as to proclaim that it is so; it just is.

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An aerial view of Waldhaus Sils with Lake Sils behind

It has long been a source of inspiration to poets, artists and philosophers – and Sils, in the high-altitude valley of Engadine in the Swiss Alps, still proves a haven of luxury and creativity

Arrival
Waldhaus – house in the woods. To an English speaker, it sounds pretty; to a German speaker, there are centuries of myth behind the forest legend. Sitting on a bench, in the larch forest in the grounds of Waldhaus Sils, we pondered this. To one side, the hotel’s terrace restaurant – a terrace dissolved in forest – was finishing up lunch service. Immediately below us, two clay tennis courts lay empty after a family session had finished – a daughter narrowly beating a father, awash with glee; a family that looked as if they had been playing tennis in the woods for generations.

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Beyond, the mountainside dropped down and you could glimpse the valley floor through the trees: a flat glacial meadow and a blue-black lake containing a couple of islands, thick with pines. Beyond, a steep, largely treeless mountainside, grass, rocks, scree, peaks.

Waldhaus Sils is at the highest point of the Engadine, the wide, high-altitude valley that carves through the east of Switzerland like a scratch in the Alps. St Moritz is 10 minutes down the road, but the village of Sils has its own character and history. Nietzsche and Hermann Hesse lived and visited here; generations of artists came here for inspiration, and some, such as Gerhard Richter, 90 years old and widely considered the greatest living artist, still do come to stay at the Waldhaus.

The Waldhaus interior is a triumph of 20th-century modern design

The Experience
The hotel is on a rock just above the village, and what seems at first to be another in the mould of excellent palace buildings in the mountains, turns out to be rather more special.

To walk through the Waldhaus is like walking through a living museum of 20th-century design – when we say living, we mean it’s like a home, rather than curated for the benefit of others. There is a window in one of the drawing rooms that looks directly out at a rock face a couple of metres behind: the rock looks like an artwork in the frame of the window. Everything, from the wood panelling to the chess tables to the signage and the way the keys are arranged behind the reception desk, speaks of indulgent artistry.

Take a room with a balcony and it is as if you are in a tree house, only the balcony also as dramatic views across and along the Engadine and Lake Sils. The rooms themselves continue the theme of being in a home: no nouveau-riche over design here. If you crave three tons of marble in your bathroom, a Toto automatic toilet and Jacuzzi, you would be better to look elsewhere- but as a coherent and relaxing take on classical luxury, it feels wonderful to be in.

Val Fex, high above the Waldhaus, photographed by Isabella Sheherazade Sanai

Eating and Drinking
Most of the residents of the Waldhaus (and it feels like a community of residents, rather than hotel guests) dine at the hotel in the evenings. The dining rooms, high-ceilinged and table-clothed, have huge windows directly into the forest, as if you are in a nest. Each evening brought us a different variation on consommé, a broth made with the stock-variously-of forest mushrooms, local vegetables, corn-fed chicken or Swiss beef; one was made with hay stock, and was sublime.

Otherwise, expect Swiss mountain cuisine, precisely prepared, and a treasury of a wine list that virtually compels you to try the wines of the Büdner Herrschaft – the warm, sunny, bijou wine-growing region in the Rhine valley of eastern Switzerland, over the mountains. There is also the terrace restaurant, overlooking the tennis courts, serving salads and grills for lunch.

Activities
Woodland-walks, lakeside-walks around Lake Sils – inspiration to poets and philosophers – rock climbing, mountain hikes to the hidden Val Fex above the hotel…And that’s just the hiking and climbing, most of which begins on a path directly from the hotel’s back door.

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You can kite-surf and paraglide nearby, or stroll down to the village of Sils and see Nietzche’s house; or stay in the hotel grounds and swim (indoors), play tennis (indoors or outside in the woods), sunbathe amid the trees – or get a cavas and paint.

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A view across the Engadine valley from Muottas Muragl, above St Mortiz

Switzerland’s Engadine region has been the enchanted holiday home of the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gerhard Richter and some of the world’s most discerning wealthy. LUX takes a summertime tour of this romantic paradise

Landscape photography: Isabella Sheherazade Sanai (@sheherazade_photography)

There was a moment in the evening, a point in the flow of time each day, when the colour on the mountain was perfectly balanced. Just below my balcony, the larch forest rising out of the lawn was an almost vanishing green, turning to black. The same forest was a dark emerald high up the mountainside. The high pastures above, a thin carpet of melded brown and dry, light, green. And the peak of the mountain, that minute, was just straining to catch the last of the day’s sun, emanating from behind the hotel, on the west side of the valley. It was the colour of a tarnished gold ring, glowing with the pride of being in daylight, today, while the rest of us had fallen into tonight.

Out of the trees and grass around me, the image was accompanied by a rising smell of damp, green, earthy life, its textures matching those in the glass of wine that would always accompany this ritual, a glass of pinot noir from two valleys away, in what the Swiss call the Bündner Herrschaft.

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The Waldhaus Sils, where my room and balcony were, is known for its magic. Artists, writers, musicians and poets are guests there, sometimes invited by the hotel for the inspiration they bring. Gerhard Richter, arguably the greatest living artist, unarguably one of the most expensive, was staying while I was there;  as were others from these worlds, whom I won’t identify as I didn’t spot them personally (the Waldhaus is very discreet about its guests).

The hotel sits on a forested ridge (thus the name Waldhaus – ‘Forest House’) above the village of Sils, once home to Friedrich Nietzsche, and overlooking Lake Sils, considered by many in the art world to be the most beautiful lake in Switzerland. The lake is at the southern end of the Engadine, a broad, flat, high-altitude valley making a slash through the most mountainous part of the country, its southeast corner, from Austria to Italy.

The Waldhaus Sils sits in a forest above the mystical Lake Sils, which has inspired poets, artists and writers since the 19th century

There is something about the Waldhaus Sils that no amount of money could create in a new hotel. The furnishings, from light fittings to tables, chairs, cabinets and even the signposts, look like they have come from a mid 20th-century Modernist sale at Phillips auction house. They are so perfectly positioned, as if everything has been looked at with aesthetic sight-lines in mind, and yet none of it feels Designed (with a capital D); this is just the aesthetic of the family who own the hotel. No wonder Richter and others love it so.

The Waldhaus mixes old, in the sense of mid-20th century, with a very up-to-date cuisine and wine list. Most guests take the half-board option, with dinners in a broad gallery of a dining room, with picture windows looking into the forest. Most memorable were the variations on a consommé, each night made with a different base stock; and the choucroute and pork fillet served by a visiting farmer-chef one evening.

One of the bars at the Waldhaus Sils

One day, we walked out of the hotel down through the trees until we reached the floodplain of the lake, a flat meadow between the shore and the village. It was a summer day of intense mountain sunshine – you burn much more quickly here at altitude than down on the Mediterranean – but a flapping, chilly wind reminded us of exactly where we were. Along the lakeshore, a child and a dog were paddling in the water, on a tiny beach sprouting out of the path. The path itself curved past a tiny jetty housing a couple of rowing boats, and onto a forested promontory. Dipping and rising between larch trees and the water’s edge, it offered a different perspective every minute, with changes of light and in the colour of the water on the lake. The mountains beyond emerged bigger with every step we took away from them; my own mountain, which I had watched from the balcony, was revealed to be no more than the leading ridge of a much larger cluster of peaks at the end of what was a hidden valley.

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We walked along that valley the next day. To get there, we first took a cable car from Sils up to a station above the treeline, from where we looked down at a string of lakes extended all the way down the Engadine past St Moritz, and were greeted by a pack of manic, crested chickens sprinting around a coop with a view most humans would crave. We walked along a path skirting the edge of the mountainside, past uncurious cows, until a luscious green valley, alternating meadows, streams, forest and hamlets, appeared beneath us. Invisible from the Engadine, this is Val Fex, home to some of the most ancient communities in Switzerland, who used the secret nature of the place (its entrance is sheathed in a deep, forested gorge which looks impassable from below) to shelter from invaders from Italy and the Germanic lands.

Along a woodland path at the bottom of the little valley, home to thousands of butterflies, we reached the Hotel Fex, where we had a fantastic lunch made of foraged and farmed local ingredients – young beef, herbs, grasses and flowers – while gazing at the high end of the valley. It was an hour’s walk, down past the butterflies and the meadow and through the gorge, to the Waldhaus and a balcony view back up to the sunset peak.

The forested peninsula on Lake Sils, nearly 2km above sea level

St Moritz is fifteen minutes’ drive down the Engadine valley from Sils, and it has a roster of legendary palace hotels. Our destination was just outside the town of St Moritz, on a hillside. Suvretta House, one of the oldest grande dame hotels of Switzerland, surveys the surrounding scenery like a majestic ocean liner atop a wave. As we approached from Lake Silvaplana, it was almost as if nature had bent to the grand hotel, according it its centre-stage position, with nothing around it except forest and lakes, on a ledge in this long, high valley.

That was an illusion; within a couple of kilometres of Suvretta House lies one of the highest concentrations of (vacation) wealth in the world, but part of this area’s appeal is that it doesn’t look like it.

The facade of the historic Suvretta House hotel

Our junior suite at Suvretta House had six windows opening out onto a carpet of forest below, the lakes ahead, and the peaks of the Bernina range on the east side of the valley beyond. The décor was clean and crisp, a kind of safe contemporary Swiss, with plenty of rich fabrics to please luxury’s traditionalists.

The Bernina mountains are one reason for the particularly attractive climate here; they protect the area from storms sailing up from the Adriatic beyond, while to the north and west, several ranges of high mountains stand as a kind of climatic Berlin Wall to prevent the moist Atlantic air of northern Europe arriving. The result is that this is the sunniest spot in Switzerland; and Suvretta House itself lies on a sun-trap of a ridge. We discovered this the next morning, on a pre-breakfast frolic in what must be the most picturesque children’s playground in the world, carpeted in lush grass, banked on three sides by Alpine forest and on a fourth by a slope leading down to the hotel.

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At the front of Suvretta House, the 25-metre indoor pool stretches through a conservatory alongside a broad lawn, on which sun-loungers, a giant chess set, and other leisure accoutrements are set (in summer, anyway; in winter, it would be under several metres of snow).

Suvretta House’s swimming pool

The Fuorcola Surlej restaurant above St Mortiz

Breakfast was served at the Arvenstube restaurant, and featured about 36 different types of bread, cooked (and shaped) in their own in-kitchen bakery every day from three in the morning. The buffet seemed lavish enough, until we found it extended around the corner with dozens of combinations of freshly cut fruit, more permutations of gluten-free cereal than would fit on the biggest yoga mat, an array of nuts, seeds and other health-giving items that would embarrass a health food store, and still plenty of indulgences on the pancake/ chocolate/Nutella/cooked bacon front.

We returned to the Arvenstube for dinner, at first a little apprehensive. Almost every hotel in the German-speaking Alps has a restaurant called a stube; in humble hotels these are often beer-cellar-type places serving humble food (sausages, dumplings) and good beer. Luxury hotels sometimes persist in the belief (mistaken, in our views) that a luxury stube ought to be a play on these dishes, with lashings of old- fashioned Michelin-chasing creams, foams and drizzles, and tiny portions that make you wish you had gone out for some fondue instead.

What we found instead was a revelation. In the beautiful evening light as the valley turns to night – the Arvenstube faces south – there was a menu based on the concept of ‘Switzerland  meets Latin America’ from chef Isaac Briceño Obando, and it really worked. Examples: Puschlaver lamb, baby corn, roasted spring onions, tortilla powder and mountain honey; or Swiss cheese, guava jelly, tamarind jelly and paprika coulis; or tepid char with grilled peach, palm hearts and pine nuts. It was the distinctive, balanced, vivid cuisine of someone with a real ability to understand how and by whom his dishes would be consumed. We returned there three times and always had clear, crisp options.

On the path to the aptly-named Paradise hut, above Pontresina

Goat’s cheese with rocket and truffle at Chasselas

The Suvretta House also owns the Gault Milau-celebrated restaurant just up the road, the Chasselas. At the bottom of a piste, with its own chairlift linking it to the main Corviglia ski area of St Moritz, the Chasselas tries hard to look like a pristine, immaculate but humble mountain hut; however, the cuisine and wine list are anything but humble. We loved the medium-grilled saddle and braised cheeks of Iberico pork with artichokes, balsamic onions and plain in pigna, and Irish highland lamb racks with salsa verde, grilled vegetables and barley risotto. Different chef, but the Suvretta principles remained: there was nothing on the menu to weigh you down and make you feel, like many mountain restaurants do, that you need to climb the nearest peak to burn everything off.

It’s tempting never to leave Suvretta House (either during your stay, or when it’s time to depart) but we did, one day taking a cable car up the opposite side of the valley, towards Piz Corvatsch, and walking along a rocky, dramatic, high altitude trail until we reached a restaurant in a little mountain hut on a ridge. The other side of the ridge revealed a little lake, and a flabbergasting view down to a glacier and up to a range of high, snowy, rocky peaks. Fuorcula Surlej, the restaurant, really is a humble mountain hut. The owner told us she lives there, with only her dog for company, all summer and all winter; when she returns after her autumn break to open up for the ski season, all the available water is frozen in blocks of ice and she curls up with her dog to keep warm.

A small staff in her kitchen were making dishes off a short menu; we tried the barley soup, which tasted of fields and mountains together as we ate it on the terrace, looking out at the high peaks framed by dreamy deep blue; followed by a spaghetti with ragu, flavoursome home-made food by someone whose home is a ridge at the top of nowhere, towering above the Engadine.

Darius Sanai

For more information and to book your stay visit: waldhaus-sils.ch; suvrettahouse.ch

This article was first published in the Winter 19 issue.