Renzo Mongiardino’s daring take
on the Kulm Hotel

For design aficionados and collectors alike, the canonical figure of Italian architect Renzo Mongiardino is associated with some of the most celebrated and inspirational interiors from the 1960s onwards. Celebrating the arts and crafts of the past in unparalleled poetry, his built realisations were crafted for an international and elite clientele — composed of the likes of Princess Lee Radziwill or the Rothschild, Versace and Agnelli dynasties — and have therefore predominantly stayed in the domestic realm. His commission, almost 30 years ago, for the entrance and lobby of the Kulm Hotel in St. Moritz appears as one of the master’s few projects to be open to a broader audience, all the while still detaining secrets to be told.

Stepping into the Kulm Hotel is assuredly never a trifling affair. In the purest of grand hotel tradition, both its entrance and lobby have always acted as a crucial crossroad for the intermingling lives unfolding within the sprawling building, hosting either informal or business meetings, impromptu gatherings, or administrative duties. Here, and possibly more than anywhere else, these central loci distinctively entertain with stories, legends, as well as a certain kind of magic belonging to both past and present in unrivalled stately style.

It is the subtle art of Lorenzo ‘Renzo’ Mongiardino that is at play here and has been since 1997, when the architect completed the two rooms, only a few years before his passing and at the end of an undeniably prolific career led from his Milan practice.

After having completed highly notable work for both film and stage sets earlier on in his career — his first collaborators included directors Franco Zeffirelli and Gian Carlo Menotti — the architect notably went on singlehandedly signing decors for household names La Fenice and La Scala, working on star-studded operas and ballets such as Tosca and Nureyev’s Nutcracker.

Genoa-born Mongiardino achieved further recognition in completing an eclectic array of private projects in his clients favoured destinations between countryside follies and apartments nested in the world’s busy capitals. While his work for the Kulm doesn’t constitute his sole realisation in the Engadin — he was notably enlisted by Marella Agnelli for designing Chesa Alcyon in the Suvretta hills — this project is nonetheless drastically significant as one of his last productions at an already advanced age and has been preserved in pristine condition by the hotel throughout the years.

Although at a more meagre scale, the architect also completed both bars for New York’s Carlyle and Rome’s Grand Hotel Plaza, all setting prestigious precedents for the now-popular practice of innovative collaborations between esteemed designers and iconic hotel institutions the world over.

Mongiardino’s savant use of ancestral techniques in both eccentric and historicist style seems to have found a perfect home in the generously proportioned, palatial hotel entrance. In an ultimate nod to the past at age 80, the architect imagined for the double height room a series of striking light-toned intarsia trompe-l’œil framed in matching timber pilasters. The panels, with their successive and mesmerising illusions of both depth and light, are succeeding in transforming the whole room into an awe-inspiring narrative. This bold ornamentation choice allowed him to toy freely with a variety of rich essences of wood as well as with the intricate art of perspective drawing, serving the depiction of villages and interior scenes simultaneously reminiscent of Engadin pastoral life while also and more incongruously lush Palladian architecture.

Mongiardino’s fascination for the pictorial and technical feats found in this technique, favoured by the great Renaissance masters and craftsmen he revered, had taken shape upon his discovery of the studiolo in Gubbio’s Palazzo Ducale, an impressive fifteenth century paneled room built as a connoisseur study for nobleman Federico da Montefeltro. Although in sensible parsimony, other instances of this technique can be found in the architect’s existing body of work, such as in the astonishing Manhattan “Casa Sharp” or in Elsa Peretti’s home set in the Tuscan hills. At the Kulm, the panels are paired with plush carpeting as well as carved upholstered chairs wittily clustered around a daily schedule of the neighbouring Cresta Run and displayed at the attention of its members, long-time habitués of the hotel.

After a flight of wide steps, one enters a new, contrasting atmosphere recalling the fantastic world of a fine medieval Gobelins tapestry. The visitor feels gently grasped into consecutive layers of rich gold and red brocade, crowned by large chandeliers that wouldn’t feel out of place in Versailles. The distinctive maximalist patterns used in rigorous style by Mongiardino are playfully applied to equally pilasters, draperies and walls, all merging as if by magic against the deep coffered ceiling and monumental mantelpieces, themselves worthy of the most lavish roman palazzi. The architect’s own fondness for everything bizarre and out of the ordinary exerted in most of his projects is tactfully reflected in an abundance of small, quirky details over the room: mysterious portrait sitters and wrought iron armories all look as if under a magical spell. There is indeed a sorcery at play here, of which the Italian master is the ultimate conductor. Even in the darkest of winter days, the stained-glass ceiling provides the vast room an incomparable bright quality, while the dominant warm tones are accentuated by the lit open fire, accompanied by the soft repercussions of cups on silver platters.

Cushioned from the street outside, the ballet of white jackets swarming in and out of swinging doors fitted with portholes adds to this precise and sound mechanism that is the Kulm at teatime. This golden lobby ultimately finds its own focal point in the three large bay windows opening onto the grand, tranquil lake below. It is here exactly, sat in those regal armchairs and through this singular historic prism oriented towards the large southern vistas of the Upper Engadine valley, that one feels at the center of an exceptional landscape.

While Swiss craftsmanship is celebrated through the ornate millwork and an undeniable Italianate feeling is reigning, there is also an abundant Britishness presiding over the room, recalling the unmistakable aura infused by the earliest members of St. Moritz’s international and bustling society.

There is no doubt in saying that one of the permanent marvels of the Kulm are those well-preserved, authentic Mongiardino rooms hosting both a renewed and habitual society each day and detaining at their hearts the creative aura of a bygone master who will eventually have influenced a whole knowledgeable and cultured generation up to today. Standing still as one of Mongiardino’s last project, these rooms, at the center of the complex and captivating scheme that is the Kulm Hotel, perpetually help value this fascinating artistic legacy as well as the noblest traditions of hospitality. 

Cécile Christmann is a Paris-based architect, interior designer and curator for publisher Assouline, as well as a writer and artistic director. A keen traveller, she regularly writes on hotels, buildings and cities, focusing on both architecture, characters and history.