High design: checking in at The Brecon hotel

Design

High design: checking in at The Brecon hotel

With mountain views, elevated style and chalet soul, The Brecon has all the ingredients of a cult classic

Stephanie Gavan

BY Stephanie Gavan15 January 2025

Switzerland and Wales may not make for likely bedfellows, but for Grant Maunder — native Welshman and ‘accidental’ hotelier — the two nations have quite a bit in common. There’s the shared red and white of their flags, their equally green and mountainous terrain, and their clusters of charming towns and villages, which, in an age of information, still feel somewhat under-the-radar. Take Adelboden, a Swiss Alpine village in the Bernese Oberland, where the Maunder family first visited some 40 years ago. The village hasn’t changed much in that time; its petite high street remains a picturesque run of homespun bakeries, speciality cheese shops and chalet-style cafés arranged around a 15th-century church, with the dramatic Wildstrubel massif in the background. But some things have changed quite a bit, including The Brecon hotel: an Eighties-era chalet turned contemporary Alpine hangout, said by many to be one of Switzerland’s most stylish.

It’s just past 3pm by the time we pull up beside the hotel, which is clad in century-old timber framework. We’ve snaked our way through The Sound of Music-esque valleys where bell-adorned cows merrily graze, and, on stepping inside, it becomes clear that while The Brecon’s traditional exterior is very much at one with local vernacular, its interiors have a grammar of their own. Overseen by Amsterdam-based design studio Nicemakers, the hotel is a contemporary reimagining of a retro chalet. ‘We toured the old hotel and took inspiration from the original details, reinstating or modernising certain features,’ said Lotti Lorenzetti, Nicemaker’s Head of Design. ‘The textured plaster, for example, and timber ceiling. We’re often inspired by the past, so drawing inspiration from the original hotel helped us carve the design path, including being inspired by 1970s skiing outfits and gear.’

In the ground-floor lounge, curved wood and white-plaster walls set a stage for mid-century design icons like the Jean Gillon lounge chairs — whose wrinkled leather whispers tales of parties past — hand-knotted rugs by Layered and Futurist-style artworks from Dutch gallery Bisou. Tastefully stacked objets d’art surround cosy corners lit by mid-century pendant lights, where design magazines are piled high on coffee tables. It’s a marked departure from the sleek, minimalist design hotels of Gstaad or St Moritz, but then, Adelboden — roughly translated as ‘noble ground’ — has always been more Heidi and hot chocolate than clean lines and champagne. ‘We wanted to offer something different, more layered,’ Lottie continued, ‘by leaning into traditional construction materials and embracing more kitsch elements like the folky scatter cushions in the lobby.’

The result is a space bestowed with a shoes-off sense of familiarity and ease, much like that of a generous friend’s house. As such, The Brecon is completely all-inclusive — a welcome relief in a country known for its wallet-denting prices; and we take full advantage, rocking up to the kitchen for coffee and cake by day and an indulgent four-course meal by night. ‘We want to create an atmosphere where guests feel at home.’ Martina, our host for the weekend, tells me. And we do, spurred on, no less, by the living room’s help-yourself bar, a feature which makes the question ‘one more?’ ridiculously easy to answer.

There’s a touch of home here for the hotel’s owner, too, with accents of his native Wales sprinkled throughout the hotel. Cloud-like beds are topped with specially commissioned throws from Melin Tregwynt, a family-run wool mill in Pembrokeshire while the hotel’s visual identity — from the uniforms to the Celtic-style ‘B’ embroidered on towels and etched onto menus — has been created by Cardiff-based Smörgåsbord Studio. ‘We tried to incorporate some reminiscent connection to Wales.’ Lottie explained, ‘A Welsh print inspired the bespoke pattern of the corridor carpet, and the owner’s wife — the artist Andréa Anderson — made all the ceramic tableware in her studio in Wales.’ My favourite of all these subtly Welsh wonders has to be the lobby flooring: shimmery, silver flagstones hand-fitted by an artisan flown in from Maunder’s hometown.

As for how this native Welshman ended up here, in this remote village some 800 miles from home, is a pleasing story. During Maunder’s first visits to Adelboden, the family’s shoestring budget confined them to rather unconventional accommodation: a nuclear fallout shelter beneath a guesthouse. He recalls passing the former Cambrian hotel and being mesmerised by its glass doors and open fireplace. ‘We never got to stay there,’ he noted, ‘but we did buy it some 20 years later.’

Today, Maunder’s duo of boutique hotels (The Cambrian‘s new outpost — a similarly Cymru-inspired stay and Maunder’s first foray into hospitality) bookend the village’s main drag as notably more modern hideaways in a place that remains mercifully the same; backed by those same mountainous highlands enshrined in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and Byron’s romantic verse. The same jagged peaks that influenced the world-building of Tolkien. A place of noble dreams fully realised.

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