The spa volume is covered with gardens and on arrival the only hint of spaces that might lie inside is across a series of bonsai courtyards. The timber cladding of the new elements plays a game of shadows and creates a material landscape embedded in the green gardens, marrying with the complex old hotel buildings in a synthesis of architectural language and simplicity in materials, ensuring that the senses are not overwhelmed. The language of the new adopts the symbolic traits of the historical buildings, recalling the proportions and character of the vernacular, combining the organic with the geometric, all in chromatic harmony.

Inside, the transition between environments of varying degrees of intimacy is curated, forms and colours are borrowed from the surrounding nature. Along the lake, bound by the purifying beauty of the Alps, we are compared to the magnificent scale of the mountains and the sky; on entering the building we experience a gradual reduction to a more human scale. In its microcosmic fluidity, this is a journey from the experience of the great mountains through to the most private intimate spaces.