Mountain culture is a contemporary gear fetishist's dream - whether you're skiing, hiking, or launching yourself downhill in any number of dramatic ways. Yet as you trudge back to your accommodation, a glaring anachronism becomes clear: traditional design dominates in domiciles.
Read more: Hit the slopes in luxury with our ultimate guide to the best skiing gear
Still, there are notable exceptions. The maverick Italian Carlo Mollino interspersed a "lively" career - racing cars, creating kinkily elaborate wooden furniture and taking smutty Polaroids - with designs for alpine buildings, including the former ski-lift base in Lago Nero. Norman Foster built the Chesa Futura, a bulbous chalet complex in St Moritz. And the French resort of Flaine in the Haute Savoie stands as a concrete tribute to the Brutalism of Marcel Breuer. Even the late Zaha Hadid created a museum for climber Reinhold Messner that threads through the slopes of Mount Kronplatz in Italy.
The following four projects offer a fresh take on the age-old mountain cabin, re-interpreting traditional forms to create audacious alpine modernism for the truly adventurous.
Saunders Architects
To call Saunders Architects' Carraig Ridge a housing estate would be rather unjust - think of it as a new vision for sensitive land-use. Set in 2.6km2 of pristine Canadian wilderness, the firm will build just 44 homes, each based on either one of five long, low models inspired by a letter of the alphabet (I, O, T, V or Y), or, depending on it's location, a Stack, Passive, Switch or Earth House.
Shown below is the interior of a V House. Divided into two wings, one side provides a main living area and master bedroom and bath; at the tip of the V is a large, open kitchen and entry to the house; the other side of the V has a second bedroom and utility. Each property will be placed so as to be hidden from sight from any other.
A family chalet designed to exploit the best views of the Hallingdal Valley, a resort in the centre of Norway, about 100km north of Oslo, the Split View Lodge offers up landscape vistas through the twin gables that fork off the main living space.
Four bedrooms are set in the main body of the building (with a small annexe alongside), with the V-shaped living area branching off to create those dramatic views. Reiulf Ramstad has disrupted the more traditional forms associated with the ski lodge, rendering the results with typically thorough Norwegian craftsmanship and carpentry.
SeARCH Architects
SeARCH's Chalet Anzère sits among a thicket of trad chalets and apartment buildings in the Swiss resort of Anzère. Taking inspiration from the region's traditional farmhouses and the 17th century Grand Chalet of Rossinière, this private house was created for a Dutch client to replace the spec design sold with the site.
The main living space is a concrete-coated temple with stunning views. The plot includes a garage complex lower down the mountain, linked to the chalet by an underground walkway and elevator. The principal façades are broken up by geometric divisions that reference the main elements of the house - private apartment, main living area and owner's top floor eyrie.
Patkau Architects
This bold reinvention of the traditional British Columbian cabin was designed by Vancouver-based Patkau Architects for a businessman client. The Hadaway House is located in the BC resort of Whistler and is conceived as an origami-esque deconstruction of the conventional chalet form. The angular façade appears to fold into itself, planned like a rhombus-shaped wedge that fans out to provide sweeping mountain views.
Ipe-wood cladding and glazing bars are all set at a variety of angles, while the internal floor levels also step down and up within the large living area, with built-in furniture blending into the ribbon-like walls. The jagged forms are partly shaped by the strict rules that determine how snow must fall from roofs, and where it can land, creating a shape that the architects emphasise through the relationship between inside, outside, roof, wall and floor.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
