Alpine Ornamentation

In their project for the Bühelwirt Hotel in St. Jakob, Pedevilla Architects have already addressed the question of how to add an ornamental element to their extremely reduced and sculptural architectural language. There Armin and Alexander Pedevilla have broken through the side walls of the alcove-like balconies with a simple geometric pattern that is reminiscent of simple folk art without in any way falling into folklore. 

Now the architects have considerably further developed these approaches for a group of buildings for the Kurhotel Bad Schörgau. The four-star hotel needed rooms for a new spa area, a sales and application area for personal care products, and a cooking school in which hotel the highly decorated chef Egon Heiss imparts his knowledge to guests.

For this project Pedevilla Architects also used almost exclusively local building materials, whereby light coniferous wood determines the impression, both inside and out. Add to that coarse white litter plaster and terrazzo in the spa or a huge kitchen block of grey-green porphyry in the cooking school. Decorative elements appear far more strongly at the Kurhotel Bad Schörgau than at the hotel building in St. Jakob. They cover the facades on the exterior as well as the walls and ceilings in the interiors. The architects create them from simple geometric basic forms. In the spa, however, they also create an openwork wooden lattice whose ornamentation is derived from a historical predecessor building. As a kind of counterpart, they create a gently curved relaxation room with a round skylight, whose wall covering made of rectangular wooden shingles seems almost random.