Leis Holiday Houses (Oberhus, Unterhus, Türmlihus)

Leis is the highest settlement in the municipality of Vals that is inhabited all year round, and its chapel, dedicated to St James the Greater, dates from the early seventeenth century. It is in this hamlet that the Zumthor family had three timber houses built: the Oberhus, the Unterhus and the Türmlihus.

In 2009 Peter Zumthor told how the first two came about. His wife Annalisa had always wanted to live in a wooden house; when she spoke of it, he pictured a private house in the mountains where she would live alone, without him or the children. That house had now been built, bright among the hamlet's timber buildings blackened by age, and a second, smaller one had gone up beside it at the same time: these are the Oberhus and the Unterhus, built for the couple. Peter Zumthor then designed a third house, the Türmlihus.

In the first two houses, the walls are built of planed fir beams, 11 cm wide, 20 cm high and no more than 6.60 m long, piled course upon course over three storeys. The corners are dovetailed; where the interior layout meant the walls had to end flush instead of one projecting past the other, as a dovetail demands, the corners are finger-jointed, the classic corner joint.

Everything reached the site already machined: beams for walls, floors and roof, wooden window linings, steel fittings. Every hole, groove and notch was already on the right piece, in the right place; some 5,000 beams went into the first two houses, hardly two of them alike. A computer-controlled machine cut them in the carpenter's workshop, working from the construction drawings that Zumthor's architects had produced at the end of the design. “Building meant putting together,” Zumthor writes.

These two houses have large windows, running from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling, that frame the landscape. Yet traditional log construction, a box of four walls, allows no such openings: pierced too much, the walls would lose their strength. Zumthor therefore reduced the timber box, the main room of the region's Alpine farmhouses, to a service room: the plan sets out a number of small log boxes of varied sizes and shapes, built in the traditional way, holding stairs, pantries, bathrooms and lavatories. Standing free in the plan, stacked from floor to floor like hollow pillars and tied together by glued-laminated timber floors, they form the load-bearing structure with those floors; the gaps between them are glazed, which gives the large windows. The side walls of two boxes facing each other reach out toward the view and, with the floor and ceiling beams spanning between them, make broad bay windows to live in. Where needed, steel pins or cables hold the free ends of walls together. One moves from view to view, and the timber, present everywhere, glows softly in the light.

At the top of each house is the living floor. In the Türmlihus it is cross-shaped, with four panoramic windows facing the four points of the compass; four large bay windows hold, in turn, the open kitchen, a dining corner, a sitting area with a soapstone stove and a work corner, from where a door leads out to the sunny terrace on the slope. In the Oberhus, four bay windows likewise house the open kitchen, the table, the living area with its soapstone stove, to the south-west, and a work corner that gets the evening sun. In the Unterhus, the living room has the character of an enclosed viewing platform, glazed on two sides, with the landscape seeming to flow through it. The bathrooms and shower rooms are of teak. The three houses share a small stone-paved square in front of the Türmlihus entrance.

The three houses welcome guests for holiday stays. Furniture and lamps are signed by Eileen Gray, Eero Saarinen, Warren Platner, Antonio Citterio, Rodolfo Dordoni, Baltensweiler and Zumthor himself.

Staying in the houses means renting them: bookings and enquiries go through Zumthor Ferienhäuser in Chur, by telephone or e-mail. Each house is for the exclusive use of its guests. A road serves Leis all year round.