Staying in Zumthor's Swiss Wooden Cabin

1-- First snow of the season occurred our first night. My memory is that the walls never felt cold. We started a fire using that granite cylinder fireplace. You pack it with about 12 logs, light it and then shut the door tightly. It burns the wood efficiently over several hours and then continues to radiate ten+ hours of heat into the house. Overall: very comfortable.

I think the beams were 6" of solid wood.

2-- Alpine woods are incredible. The table top in that picture was unfinished. The instructions of the house say that if you spill something, you just wipe it off with a damp rag.

I was terrified of eating fondue or jam-and-bread with my kids there, thinking we would mess up his table. Fact is: we did have spaghetti and spilled sauce, and the damp rag treatment didn't leave any stains.

Zumthor also seems to have a big family and there is evidence his grandchildren operate like normal kids in that place.

My son gave me a wooden box carved from alpine wood, and the maker intentionally kept it unfinished. The maker told me that the oils in the alpine wood provide a natural protection; +1 yr later and that box sits in our kitchen holding salt. It has developed a natural patina despite lots of mid-sautee grabs, opens, and pinches.

TLDR: like cedar, ipe, and other special woods, I think the wood used to build this house will last a long time in that natural environment.

1- Those beams under the roof on the picture are not part of the interior. There is probably some insulation between construction and outside cladding. There is also some in-between construction.

2- If outside is painted it needs to be repainted at some point. There are also untreated facades or facades treated with fire [0]. Untreated wooden facade must have air gap behind to prevent rot. In case of untreated wood - color and shape is not stable. But in case of facade this is not issue. Structural elements and window/door frames should be treated though.

[0]: ie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakisugi

For the first question, not a perfect answer, but my family owns a log cabin in the Pacific Northwest, and the logs retain heat. Go there any time of the year when nobody's been around for a while and it's like stepping into a refrigerator, but if you light a fire and keep it burning all day, the walls heat up and it gets liveable inside. It's a bit of a downer if you just stop by for lunch, but it's great for a 4-day weekend.

Wood structures in Switzerland can last an extremely long time. My relatives own a farm in the Bernese Oberland and the main farmhouse/barn is made almost entirely from wood and is at least 300 years old. There is a neighbor's farm house that has wooden beams in it that, after some investigation, the owner thinks are more than 500 years old. Another family member owns a wooden home (near Mammern) that is about 150 years old.

1. In the winter trees don’t freeze solid, and firewood burn rate has an inverse relationship to log diameter.

2. Wood durability (species and quality being equal) depends on cyclical moisture exposure. Submerged timber can remain intact for centuries. In the rain forest the same wood might rot in a few decades.

From a construction standpoint, the glass in the house would dominate the conductive heat losses of the wall assembly.

From a maintenance standpoint, one piece of old wood is fungible with a new piece and two 2x4’s properly nailed together are stronger than a single 4x4…that’s why light frame construction uses double top plates, jack studs, etc.

Aesthetically the potential for patina is a reason an architect might choose wood finishes.

The problem with the Felsentherme is that it was sold off to an investor, who intentionally wanted to make it exclusively available to well heeled hotel guests.

While you can still visit it as a non-guest you need to reserve in advance and prices are 60 francs (~60$) on Monday / Tuesday and 80 francs on other days.

Even though Switzerland is an expensive country such prices for a spa visit without any extras are beyond the outrageous.

We also visited Therme Vals; that was the point of our trip. While I love the majesty of stone Vals, which have these huge stone slabs that hang above your head with small gaps, his houses in Leis are the human-scale version of his emotional approach to space.

low season, long weekend, 1850chf.

We are a family of 5, and in Switzerland, that means 2 hotel rooms x 3 nights. Staying in Zumthor's cabin is certainly a splurge, but marginal utility of staying in a special place well exceeds marginal costs.

Also, if you are irrationally nostalgic like me, the renting experience felt like how airbnb felt in 2011...before all the bad experiences which have swamped it in the last 5yrs

+1 even more so, because I could see the small flaws and gaps that Zumthor may tolerate in a personal dwelling, but may not fly in large-scale projects.

Lesson for me: perfection isn't necessary for the experiences I want from exceptional architecture.

Wouldn't it be more like Thomas Keller cooking you whatever he is having on a random Thursday night? Executed with style, but not overbearingly perfect like one might expect from a 3 Michelin star restaurant.

Hiking, skiing, exploring. Some people still raise goats, sheep, animals in the high mountain country. They make exquisite local cheese from the milk.

No shops is a feature.

Your version of hell is my version of paradise.

It's a wood plancks cabin with rockwool insulation in the middle of the wall. I believe central heating works via wood burn.

It might not seem like that to the author.

This cabin is at ~1500 meters of altitude, in a village with a road and several other buildings. For rural Switzerland, that's not living far away from civilization - that's just living in civilization. I would even assume you get normal postal service like every other place in Switzerland not separated from the outside world by cable car.

I'm sure it's worth investigating about the architecture of e.g. the huts of the Swiss Alpine Club [0]. These are up there in the ~3000 meters range, only accessible by multi-hour hikes and only seasonally maintained. German-language Wikipedia has a great lot of information and pictures [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Alpine_Club

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_H%C3%BCtten_des_Schw...