There is something very romantic about Nina Freudenberger’s new book: Berghuis. Perhaps it’s the season in which they were captured: many of the homes—ranging from clifftop mansions to log cabins—were photographed in the cool, snowy reaches of winter. Perhaps it is the interiors, most of which are the visual embodiment hygge. Or perhaps it’s their far-flung settings that allow us to indulge in our own escapist, Walden Pond-esque fantasies. “There’s something about the distance and incredible beauty of these landscapes that can put the endless beeping and buzzing of our devices into perspective. In a world this big, nothing is more urgent,” Fredenberger wrote.
Indeed, beauty abounds within the pages of the coffee table book, featuring remote homes from the Austrian region of Tyrol to the Atlas Mountains. Some of them have household names attached to them: for example, a house in Méribel was designed by the late, great French modernist Charlotte Perriand, while another in Patagonia is owned by Michelin-starred chef Francis Mallmann. Meanwhile, an extensive spread is dedicated to Not Vital’s childhood home in Sent, Switzerland, which now serves as his artistic retreat. “If you come from this valley, you always come back here,” says Vital. “The nature, the environment, the language – we speak Romansh, a language that not even one percent of the Swiss population speaks, so I had to come back and use my mother tongue.”
There is a famous stanza in Robert Frost’s poem: “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”: My little horse must find it strange / To stop without a farm nearby / Between the forest and the frozen lake / The darkest evening of the year. With all due respect to Frost, Berghuis is full of places where to stay for a while seems the most natural and desirable thing in the world.
Check out some of the most spectacular homes below Berghuis.
