Service/Hospitality and Institutions
Hospitality and Institutions
For private clubs, small hotels, foundations, and family estates that receive guests.
We work with private clubs, small hotels, foundations, and family-held estates that receive guests under their own name. Most of the year that means thirty to seventy keys, a kitchen that feeds members and visitors out of the same range, a chapel or a library or a stable yard that has to stay legible, and a board or a family that will read the same building for the next forty years. We treat these commissions the way Festen treated Hotel du Couvent and the way Pierre Yovanovitch treated Le Coucou Meribel: we read the building first, edit the program until it fits the building, and then specify every fixed material to a named workshop. Restoration discipline is the through line. A small hotel in the Engadin, a hunting estate in Litchfield County, and a foundation house on the Italian lakes share one spec sheet.
The guest sequence is the brief
We write every hospitality commission against eight rooms in sequence: arrival, threshold, fire, dining, room, bath, garden, departure. Arrival is the gravel, the lantern, the staff who takes the bag. Threshold is the boot room, the coat, the dog, the smell of wax on old oak. Fire is the first public room. A working hearth or a Sommerhuber ceramic stove anchors it. The reception desk sits later, off the secondary axis. Dining splits in two, a daily room and a long table for the night the chef cooks for the house. Room is bedding, blackout, water pressure, a reading chair that holds a person for two hours. Bath is stone, brass, a window that opens, a tub deep enough to sit in. Garden is the courtyard, the kitchen plot, the path to the pool, the bench under the linden. Departure is the same staff member at the door, the car loaded, the note in the room. We design and specify against that sequence before we draw a plan.
The named hotel canon, as working precedent
We carry a short canon of European hospitality work that we cite by name in every brief. Hotel du Couvent in Nice, where Festen Architecture read a seventeenth-century convent as a city block and let the cloister, the bakery, and the herbalist remain visible inside a working hotel. Le Coucou Meribel, where Pierre Yovanovitch built a chalet hotel out of fumed larch, red felt, and ceramic detail without performing the Alps. Passalacqua on Lake Como, where the De Santis family restored a private villa into a thirty-room house that still reads as inherited. Castello di Reschio in Umbria, where Count Benedikt Bolza spent two decades restoring an estate of farmhouses into a single hotel run as one estate. Splendido Mare in Portofino, where Martin Brudnizki worked the village pensione without flattening the Ligurian light, and Splendido above it, the Belmond hotel built into a sixteenth-century Capuchin monastery on the hillside. Schloss Elmau in Bavaria, where a private foundation runs a hotel, a concert hall, and a literary program out of one building under the Wetterstein near Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The Alpina Gstaad, where HHF and the Bertarelli family rebuilt a grand alpine hotel in spruce, fieldstone, and brass. Borgo Santandrea on the Amalfi coast, where one family commissioned a single workshop to produce thirty-one custom encaustic tile patterns for the floors. We do not chase these references. We measure our own specifications against them.
Four moves we make, drawn from the canon
The first is the boot room as the first interior room, the way Reschio handles arrival before the foyer. Coats, dogs, gun cases, ski bags, wet boots, a bench, a sink, a window. The foyer comes second and stays clean because the boot room did its work. The second is the deleted room. Yovanovitch took a bedroom out of the original Le Coucou layout to give the lobby the volume the building wanted. We do the same: when the program lists thirty keys and the building wants twenty-eight, we cut the two and give the public rooms back their proportion. The third is the single-workshop tile move. Borgo Santandrea commissioned thirty-one custom patterns from Cotto Vietri rather than running a sample book across six suppliers. We do this with terracotta from Salernes in Provence, with Henraux Calacatta out of Querceta, with Sommerhuber ceramic out of Steyr, with Engadin sgraffito from a single Zuoz workshop. One hand, one kiln, one color register across the house. The fourth is the Festen reading: we walk the building with the owner, name what is original, what is later, and what is wrong, before we draw a single line.
Program, scale, and what we take on
We work on private clubs of forty to two hundred members, small hotels of twenty to seventy keys, foundation houses with a public program and a private wing, and family estates that host paying guests four months of the year. We are willing to lead the architecture, the interiors, the joinery package, the procurement of every fixed material, the staff back-of-house layout, the kitchen brief written with the chef, and the operating handover. We are equally willing to consult inside a team that already includes an architect of record and an operator. We will not take a commission where the budget asks for the canon and the spec sheet asks for a contract finish.
Restoration first, new build where the site asks for it
Most of this work is restoration. A convent, a villa, a farmhouse, a stable yard, a hunting lodge, a Federal house on a Litchfield ridge. We strip the later additions, repair the original fabric in lime mortar and hand-troweled plaster, replace the failed mechanicals inside the historic envelope, and add only what the building asks for. When the program needs new construction, a kitchen wing, a spa, a chapel rebuilt on its old footprint, we build it in the same vocabulary as the inherited fabric: fieldstone laid in lime, hand-rived chestnut beams, fumed oak joinery, unlacquered bronze, terracotta floor. The new wing should be indistinguishable from the original within one winter.
How a brief starts
Most hospitality and institutional briefs begin with a building walk, a half day on site with the owner, the operator, and one of us. We come back with a written reading of the building, a named-workshop spec for the public rooms, a one-page guest-sequence map, and a phased restoration plan that can be costed against a real schedule. The first conversation is by phone, 917.502.9236, or by writing to contact@chesa.studio. We answer ourselves.
Private clubs
A private club in the Litchfield Hills, a Greenwich field club, an Engadin Alpine club. Member dining sized for 36 to 72 covers, a library and card room sequenced before the main hall, a coat hall placed before the foyer, a boot room for shooting and equestrian days. Hardware from P.E. Guerin, lime walls, fumed oak floors, a Sommerhuber kachelofen against the long wall.
Small hotels
Twelve to thirty keys. The Hotel du Couvent register, the Reschio register, the Mayflower Inn register. Lime walls, encaustic cement floors, a working back-of-house we draw before any front-of-house. A guest sequence that mirrors the boot-room-before-the-foyer position. Restoration first, new build where the site asks for it. Two of the projects we are running now sit in this band.
Foundations and institutions
A private foundation in the Hudson Valley, a study center in Lombardy, an artist residency in Provence. Climate vault to museum standards (18 to 21 degrees Celsius, 50 percent relative humidity). Conservator coordination from day one. The Soane Museum and Villa Necchi Campiglio as the working references for room sequence and collection display.
Family estates that host
A family compound with a primary house, a guest wing, a gatehouse, a carriage barn converted to staff quarters, a wine cellar at 12 to 14 degrees Celsius, climate storage for the art collection, and a working kitchen split in two. Sized to host a 24-cover dinner without the staff moving through the family rooms. Greenwich back-country and the Litchfield ridges hold these compounds.
Sources and notes
Working canon
Hotel du Couvent, Le Coucou Meribel, Passalacqua, Castello di Reschio, Splendido Portofino, Schloss Elmau, Six Senses Crans-Montana, Borgo Santandrea. Cited by name, measured by spec.
Working regions
Engadin and Graubunden, the Italian lakes, Umbria, Provence, the Bavarian Alps, Connecticut, the Hudson Valley, and New York.
Begin a hospitality brief.
Send a brief or call the studio. We respond to every serious inquiry within two working days.