The Wizard of Oz

The project is completely integrated into the nature, both physically and symbolically: the hotel follows the hill’s downward slope and from it – literally – takes its own form.

There is in fact a strong relationship, intentionally played between nature and its representation, between reality and artifice, between craftsmanship and mental picture, looking for a camouflage declared only by some architectural spot signs. The hill is metaphorically re-designed in a “low-resolution”: its contours lose clearness, dissolve and apparently lose details, becoming broken lines that defines the new intervention. It is architecture to get into the landscape with great quality but with different kind of blurring design attitudes. Those ranges from the sharpness of the two main volumes, the only two that spire over the road level defining a “green wall” and a perforated “cor-ten garden” (artificial simulation of the frontal green wall), to the fragmentation of the bedrooms into the terraces below, until the complete integration of the SPA into the natural environment.
This strategy of intervention creates therefore a system of sets and subsets with multiple connections: the hospitality system (the wellness areas, as well as the hall and the gourmet restaurant placed into the two blocks), the residence system and, in-between those two, the relational areas connoted by thematic gardens (the stone garden, the evergreen corner, the olfactory courtyard, and more…).
A kaleidoscopic architecture offers thus different levels of reading and following a settlement logic that is respectful of the landscape, which is clearly aimed to reach the best integration with the surrounding context and to offer an emotionally intense experience to its guests.