Located in a small tourist village in the Italian Dolomites, this new-built 4-star hotel became an exercise in applying contemporary design processes contextually and ‘bottom-up’ in order to produce a building that is closely related to its pastoral surroundings.

The name Cristall was deployed as leitmotif for marketing and architectural form-finding- avoiding the common clichee-based use of typology.
Looking at crystals as highly complex material organisations we developed the hotel as a series of strata - an inherent tectonic that is highly elastic and transformable without losing its inherent logic.
The project starts as a complex artificial topography that undulates over an extensive wellness & spa area, producing complex light, view and access relationships between inside and outside, above and below.
Bands of timber strips wrap around the volume and form its balconies and façade, then twist, turn and wrap through the interior rendering the lobby into a funnel-shaped ‘canyon’ framing the mountain-view, where inside and outside are collapsed.

site: by orienting the length of the building towards here, this view can be enjoyed from the lobby, the restaurant, the bar and every bedroom