Architekt Andreas Gruber Scatters 23 Dark Timber Chalets Across a South Tyrolean Forest Edge

Alpine hospitality has a scale problem. A resort that needs a spa, a restaurant, underground parking and two dozen keys usually ends up as one large hotel block wearing a pitched roof. With Amonti Chalets, Architekt Andreas Gruber takes the opposite route. The 6,500 m² complex in Molini di Tures, South Tyrol, completed in 2025, is split into 23 units scattered across a meadow at roughly 1,000 metres, where a small village gives way to a large forest.

The client, the Steger family, has run hotels for more than half a century, and they describe the project as "mountain architecture" rooted in local tradition. That label can mean almost anything. What makes Amonti worth looking at is how literally Gruber reads the farmstead: dark barn-like gables, slate roofs and timber balconies, arranged with the looseness of an agricultural settlement rather than the order of a hotel. The heavy program goes underground. What you see above grade is a collection of small houses, and the drawings show how much engineering it takes to keep it that way.

A Hamlet Instead of a Hotel Block

Seen from the meadow, the chalets step up the slope in a loose cluster below a dense wall of conifers. None of them lines up with its neighbour. Each volume turns slightly toward its own view, and the gaps between them are generous enough for tall grass to run through. This is the real design decision here: the land between the buildings is treated as the main public space, not leftover margin.

The single chalet in the grass reads almost like a hay barn, a gabled box in dark vertical boards with very little ornament. The slate-roofed version with an open balcony brings in the domestic vocabulary of the Tyrolean farmhouse. Mixing the two types keeps the cluster from looking like a catalogue product repeated 23 times, which is the usual failure of chalet villages.

Dark Boards and Perforated Gables

The cladding does most of the work. Sources describe the main material as regional wood, and the boards are finished dark, so the volumes recede against the forest rather than glowing like new pine. On the gable ends the boards are cut with teardrop-shaped openings, a nod to the carved ventilation patterns of old haylofts. Here they filter light into the rooms behind instead of airing out stored grain.

Two details complicate the folk reading. A steel grate ramp leads to a recessed door, and a steel walkway threads between dark angled walls toward the slope. These industrial elements are honest about what lies beneath: a resort with plant rooms, garages and service routes. Elsewhere, a cantilevered upper floor on timber columns sits beside a slate-roofed outbuilding, a reminder that the farmstead tradition always combined heavy and light structures on the same yard.

Outdoor Rooms and the Suspended Hearth

The open timber pavilion is the most theatrical moment on site. A black cylindrical fireplace hangs over a stone block, white sofas gather around it, and the balustrade frames the forested valley beyond. It turns the hearth, traditionally the heart of the alpine house, into a shared outdoor room for guests from different chalets.

The covered balcony with a built-in bathtub works the same way at a private scale. Bathing moves outdoors, sheltered under the roof and behind a carved balustrade. You could call it a luxury gimmick, but it follows a clear logic: the most valuable thing Amonti sells is time spent outside in this landscape, and the architecture keeps finding ways to extend the interior to the edge of the building.

Interiors Built Around Hearth, Stone and Grain

Inside, the palette stays narrow: warm browns, taupe greys, timber panelling and rough stone. A curved sofa and round table sit in a corner where sunlight passes through a fretwork screen and throws patterned shadows across the floor. The screen is the interior side of the perforated gable, and it is one of the few places where you can see the facade idea and the room idea as a single gesture.

The fireplace is again the anchor. In the bedroom shown, a plastered fireplace block rests on a rough granite base, separating the sleeping area from the living space without closing it off. This matches the reported layout of the Treehouse Chalet, a single-storey loft of over 100 m² where the fire is visible from both bed and sofa. In the bathroom, stone washbasins and a steel tap sit against dark vertical boards, the same material carried inside without softening.

Plans and Drawings

The figure-ground drawings make the urban argument plainly. The village edge is dense, and the Amonti footprints thin out into the meadow, continuing the pattern of the settlement instead of interrupting it. The landscape plan shows curving paths and tree circles weaving between rectangular roofs.

The unit plans show how compact the chalets are. Each holds a sauna, a terrace and a small living space on the ground floor, with bedrooms and bathrooms above, and the curving paths link the units without forming any formal street.

The spa and service plans reveal the hidden half of the project. The spa building runs over three levels with an indoor pool and a long outdoor pool. Below the site, two basement levels hold garages, ski storage, technical rooms and changing areas, while the reception, bar, kitchen and multipurpose rooms occupy a larger volume with an angled serving room opening onto terraces.

The sections tie it together. Chalets step up the steep slope under a rocky ridge, while the larger multi-level building sits low in the foreground, so the long service volume never competes with the rows of gables climbing behind it.

Why This Project Matters

Amonti shows that a resort of real size can still read as a hamlet, provided the architect accepts that a lot of the building has to disappear. The garages, storage, plant and much of the spa are buried or kept low, and that frees the visible architecture to stay small, varied and close to the ground. It is a more expensive way to build, and the drawings show it, but it is the only way the farmstead references hold up instead of becoming costume.

The open questions are the usual ones for luxury alpine work: how the timber weathers, and whether 23 units and a three-level spa really sit lightly at the forest edge over time. Still, Gruber's approach of treating the meadow as the main room, dark wood as camouflage and the hearth as the organising element inside and out is a clearer answer to alpine hospitality than most of what gets built in these valleys.

Amonti Chalets by Architekt Andreas Gruber. Location: Molini di Tures, South Tyrol, Italy. Area: 6,500 m². Year: 2025. Photography: Gustav Willeit.

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