Haus W: 1609 lodge rebuilt in untreated spruce, gridded screens intact

Zug, Austria. A lodge built in 1609 just reopened after a full reconstruction. Gerold and Katia Schneider took the structure down to its timber skeleton, replaced what had rotted, and rebuilt the interior in untreated spruce sourced within the Lech region. The original gridded wooden screen stayed.

The project wasn't restoration in the museum sense. It was selective demolition and replacement. Walls that couldn't hold weight came out. New spruce went in, left raw. The grain shows. The knots show. The wood will gray over time, which is the point. No stain, no seal, no attempt to freeze the material in place.

The grid and the furniture

The gridded screen is the piece people will photograph. It runs floor to ceiling in the main room, a geometric divider that recalls shoji but reads Alpine. The grid is functional: it separates the public space from the private wing without closing it off. Light passes through. So does sound, barely.

Furniture is bespoke, built by local craftspeople. Chairs, tables, lighting fixtures. The brief was apparently: keep it simple, keep it wood, keep it regional. No imports. No statement pieces flown in from Milan. The aesthetic is closer to Shaker restraint than Alpine kitsch.

The read

This is the kind of project that could have gone wrong in a dozen ways. Strip a 400-year-old building, rebuild it in raw wood, staff it with local craft labor, and you risk landing somewhere between rustic theme park and architecture-school thesis. Haus W avoids both. The grid is too sharp to be quaint. The wood is too raw to be precious. The whole thing reads as a Lodge with a capital L, but one that knows when to stop talking.

It opens this month. Zug is small, Lech is known, and the images are already circulating. By summer, the wood will have started its shift toward gray. That's when the project will really show its hand.