Boutique hotel, Vals

Twelve rooms built into a slope of quartzite, for guests who come for the baths and stay for the quiet. We kept the public rooms dark and low-lit, so the eye is never pulled from the valley outside the glazing after dusk. Stone comes from a quarry eleven kilometres away and was laid by the same team that has supplied the village for three decades. Every surface a guest touches — the door handles, the stair rail, the reading lamps — was cast in bronze and left to darken on its own.