Words Michael Snyder Photography Chris Mottalini
Published in No 19
When Vital restored the house, he removed the glass panels that had been added to the summer verandah and opened it directly to the elements. In winter, snowdrifts often fill the semi-enclosed room.
On a winter morning in 1951, when the Swiss artist Not Vital was three years old, he and his older brother went out into the yard of the family home in the village of Sent to build a tunnel beneath a thick mantle of snow. A short time later, Vital’s brother was sent off to school, but Not stayed put, intoxicated by the bright clean scent of the air and the luminous mountain sun refracted through compacted snow. “It wasn’t so comfortable to be in that tunnel, of course. It would have been more comfortable to go back inside to my parents’ home,” Vital says now. “But I thought at that moment ‘this is my habitat — this is my house.’”
There is a saying in Romansh: “If God lived on Earth, He would live in Engadin.”
For nearly 20 years, the meaning of that elemental word has been at the heart of Vital’s artistic practice. In 2005, he built his House to Watch the Sunset outside the desert city of Agadez in Niger, a 43-foot tower of mud, straw and dung conceived with the sole purpose of observing the spectacular Saharan sky. He repeated the structure a decade later in the depths of the Amazon, this time using local timber, and again in Switzerland using concrete (a version in aluminum will soon be installed on the island of Tonga with another planned for windswept plains of Mongolia in the future). He adapted the idea in 2017, for the House to Watch Three Volcanoes, on a remote island in eastern Indonesia, building a stark white observatory with an interior lined in bamboo and straw, the materials used in the traditional houses of the surrounding countryside. In 2008, Vital bought an island of solid marble in the middle of an icy lake in Chilean Patagonia and started excavating what would become a 180-foot tunnel to make a shelter not unlike that magical habitat of his early memories.
All of these are “houses” only in that childlike sense: a space where, as Vital puts it, “you can stay.” Vital has also lived in more conventional homes in Paris, Rome, Lucca, New York, Beijing and, most recently, Rio de Janeiro. Yet for all that nomadism, he has always returned home to Sent and the majestic Alpine landscapes of eastern Switzerland’s Engadin Valley.
Vital restored the typical pine wall paneling of his former bedroom.
A tourist destination since the nineteenth century, the Engadin is also a place of migrations. Many of the valley’s natives, Vital says, spent winters running coffee houses in Italy and would build their expansive stone-and-plaster Engadin houses from money earned abroad. They were known locally as “swallows.” “Going away is not new, so I was very young when I decided that that was what I was going to do.”
At age 14, Vital left home for high school and never lived full-time in Sent again, yet he’s never gone more than eight months at a stretch without at least a visit to the village of his birth. “If you’re from this valley, you always tend to come back here,” he says. “Nature, the surroundings, the language — we speak Romansh, a language that not even 1% of the Swiss population speaks — so I had to come back to use my mother tongue.” Today, Vital’s properties in the valley include a sculpture park at the edge of Sent, a house for his foundation in the nearby village of Ardez and an 11th-century castle on a hilltop roughly halfway between the two. But the family home has always been his touchstone.
A marble bath stands at the center of the primary bathroom, to better take in the mountain views.
An original fireplace off the dining room.
The house entered Vital’s family in 1946 when his father, who earned a comfortable living in the timber industry, purchased it from one of Sent’s “swallows,” who’d renovated the building in 1920 and turned its old barn, now Vital’s studio, into a dance hall. Vital’s own family had houses closer to the village’s compact center, but his mother dreamed of open space and expansive views. “She always said that the day they moved into the house — May 1, 1946 — was the most beautiful day of her life,” Vital says. “She died there, too, at 100 years old.” Afterward, Vital and his brother inherited the house together, adjusting the property to accommodate separate apartments for them both. In 2019, Vital bought his brother’s half of the house. “That same day I started to change it back to how it used to be,” he says. “I wanted the house I remembered from my childhood.”
He tore out a second kitchen and demolished the walls that had enclosed the summer verandah, leaving its carved pine arches open to the elements. In the summer he hosts dinner parties for friends from around the world; in winter storms, the room fills with snow, as exposed to the elements as the watchtowers in the Amazon and the Sahara. On any given day, Vital says, he has no idea where he might sleep — in the castle, in Agadez, or in one of the several bedrooms in the house at Sent (he has never counted the house’s rooms, he says, and wouldn’t know where to begin: “What’s a room? Everything that has a door?”). Even in Sent, he says, he often moves between bedrooms over the course of the night. “I start in one, I move to another at three in the morning,” he says. “When you wake up, it means it’s time to move on.” Vital is a nomad even at home.
The house in Sent, finally, is both homage and home, a romance for the Valley whose gravitational force is also, paradoxically, the very thing that allowed Vital to roam so widely. Isolated from the world, the Engadin is both the periphery and, at least for Vital, the center. “You look one way, people speak German, look another and they speak Italian — it’s a different country and a different language. The Engadin stops and it’s completely different,” he says. From the verandah, the mountains rear up to block the horizon, a vertiginous barrier between here and everything else. But Vital still nurtures a child’s sense of possibility and wonder. “From here,” he says, “I can see over the mountain to a different life.”
Go deeper in Mountain House © 2023 by Nina Freudenberger. Photographs © 2023 by Chris Mottalini. Published by Clarkson Potter, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group.
Michael Snyder is a freelance journalist and Contributing Editor for T: The New York Times Style Magazine based in Mexico City. His work has appeared in Saveur, The Nation, Lucky Peach, The Believer, Travel + Leisure and the Los Angeles Times, among others.
Chris Mottalini shoots for AD France, Elle Decor, August Journal and Casa Vogue, among others. mottalini.com