Hotel Therme - Vals

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  • Rooms

    18.0

  • Service

    18.0

  • Public Spaces

    19.0

  • Overall

    18.5

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Hotel Therme - Vals

Style: Modern Design

Atmosphere: Quiet

128 Rooms

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Not available online; for reservations please contact Customer Service.

The remote alpine village of Vals is best known to the world at large as the home of Switzerland’s popular Valser mineral water. Since 1996, though, architecture fanatics and spa connoisseurs have known Vals as the home of Peter Zumthor’s Therme spa, an ultra-modernist design statement in grey Valser quartzite, a place that somehow crafts a near-religious experience out of little more than stone, water and judiciously applied light.

All this may sound a bit breathless, but most anyone who’s been to the Therme baths has come away changed by the experience. The adjoining hotel was built in the sixties, and looks a bit faded in places, though the rooms are welcoming enough, in a slightly Spartan-institutional style. But the gems are the so-called Temporary rooms, which Zumthor has redesigned in an effort to create hotel spaces on par with his spa. These rooms are modern in style, all white with bright colored rugs and brown leather chairs.

The new Zumthor rooms are brilliant but a large number of the old-style rooms are still available at a lower rate; and as fine as the hotel may be it’s the spa that can’t be missed. In the spa’s lower reaches are the jacuzzis and the treatment rooms, but the main event is the series of vast pools, some hot, some cold, some scented with fresh flower petals. Lighting is dramatic, whether streaming in from blue-tinted skylights far above, or lit from below—some pools are painted bright white up to the waterline, with dark grey unfinished stone above, creating the illusion that the water itself is glowing.

The spa is open just for hotel guests early in the morning and late some evenings, and this is the best time to see it. Those accustomed to the most decadent of spa treatments might be taken aback by Therme’s approach, but nobody leaves unsatisfied. This building is one of Zumthor’s finest, and as the man himself would say, it’s better seen than merely read about.

Hotel Policies:

Hotel Therme - Vals is closed from April 13th-June 13th, 2009.