Aulina designed by Oliver Christen Architekten is a compact alpine retreat that balances precision and warmth, revealing expansive landscapes through a finely orchestrated play of timber, light, and calibrated interior craft.
Holiday Home Aulina reads as a quietly choreographed intervention on the Flumserberg, where topography becomes both anchor and alibi. Set against the rising flank of Aulinakopf, the compact structure situates itself with the self-possession of a small but assured architectural gesture. Its 53 square meters never feel defensive; instead, the house behaves like a calibrated device for framing the vastness of Lake Walen and the serrated Churfirsten beyond.
The exterior’s vertical timber formwork, shifting subtly in depth, lends the facade a tensile refinement. This is not a cabin seeking rustic anonymity, but a casket-like volume capable of withdrawal and revelation. When uninhabited, the folding shutters seal the building into a taut, nearly monolithic figure. Once opened, however, the house becomes porous, its shifting apertures granting visual and atmospheric exchanges that track the occupants’ presence.
Inside, birch plywood becomes both material and method. The interior construction reads as an intricate activation of surface: walls turn into storage, thresholds into spatial dividers, and built-ins into a quiet infrastructure of daily life. The resulting rooms feel larger than their footprint suggests, not through illusion but through a kind of architectural precision that refuses decorative excess.
The lower level is arranged as an intimate procession of functions — sleeping berths, a compact wet room, a work niche — each one allowed its own sense of enclosure. The upper floor, in contrast, opens into an expansive living, cooking, and dining zone. Views are curated rather than broadcast, with windows alternating between long sightlines and close-up references to the forest floor, rooting the interior firmly in the varied textures of its immediate setting.
The project’s strength lies in its attunement to context: the way it absorbs, redirects, and amplifies the qualities of its site. Holiday Home Aulina feels less like an object placed in the landscape than a small, thoughtful architecture that listens — and responds — with remarkable restraint.
