Modern Swiss chalets have become a refuge for the rich
As Swissinfo.ch notes, in a Swiss chalet, Audrey Hepburn, the most beautiful woman of the 20th century, escaped from depression and paparazzi. Roman Polanski sat in his paradise, the chalet "Milky Way" at the mountain resort of Gstaad, under house arrest. He was fitted with an electronic bracelet and had his ID confiscated, but was allowed to freely walk around the Alpine dacha and even breathe fresh air on the balcony and in the garden.
French Queen Marie Antoinette even lost her head over a chalet, first figuratively and then literally. Her Swiss farmstead, even if not in the Alps at all but in the Parisian summer residence of the Bourbons, was her toy beloved state, her refuge where she hid from the intrigues and boredom of Versailles.
By the way, the current chalet, as we all know it, is rather an embodied image, a kind of ideal type, the result of a fusion of many regional cultural and historical traditions of Switzerland and Europe. First, the word "chalet" was used to refer to Alpine huts where shepherds went in the summer to graze cattle. They say that identical ones stand on the slopes of the Himalayas and in the valleys of Kashmir.
Second, the traditional housing of the peasant of the Bernese Oberland also contributed its "genetic material" to the emergence of the current chalet. The first tourist-scientists, visiting German Switzerland in the 18th century and keeping travel notes, called such houses sometimes chalets, and sometimes simply "Schweizerhaus" – "Swiss house".
All this, thirdly, was superimposed on the sermons of the "citizen of Geneva" Jean-Jacques Rousseau with his calls to return to a natural, pristine state and with dreams of a wonderful fusion of man and "nature". In his cult novel "The New Heloise", he mentions the chalet more than once.
Duke Friedrich von Württemberg (1732-1797), who corresponded with Rousseau, eagerly embraced his philosophy, especially regarding landscape architecture. Arbors entwined with roses, islands on the river with Chinese bridges thrown between them, grottoes full of stalactites, a triumphal arch became a standard "gentleman's set" within the architectural fashion of the time.
An integral element here was also a dairy farm in the Swiss style – at least, that's how the ducal estate of Étupes looked. Creating Swiss farmsteads in regular parks with a clear geometric pattern became not just a fashion, but almost a matter of honor. The chalet no longer resembled either Bernese peasant houses or an Alpine hut somewhere above Montreux, but that no longer mattered! A myth was born – and that was far more significant.
The duke's daughter, Sophie Dorothea Auguste Luise, Princess of Württemberg-Montbéliard, was named Maria Feodorovna in Orthodoxy. She became the second wife of Paul I. For the birth of her firstborn Alexander, her mother-in-law Catherine the Great presented the young parents with a gift – forest lands, arable fields, and two villages, and all this property was named Pavlovskoye Selo.
Maria Feodorovna, with German pedantry and, as she herself said, "reasonable thriftiness," checking every estimate, every contractor's bill, set to work – she began to arrange the park. One that would resemble her native Étupes, but with Russian scope.
The "Old Chalet" in Pavlovsk – a round stone building on the edge of a meadow – fit perfectly into the park's style. Outside, it looks like a peasant's house: a conical thatched roof, plank shutters, a fruit garden and vegetable beds around. Inside – carved gilded furniture, mirrors, crystal chandeliers, a study with a library of a hundred books, paintings, silk draperies with paintings, and parquet flooring. By the way, one can only judge the house from pictures and memoirs: it burned down during World War II.
Sometimes, to fool around, Maria Feodorovna and the children (among them were two future emperors – Alexander and Nicholas) in peasant costumes themselves treated courtiers and guests strolling through the park to black bread and fresh milk, pouring it from a vase. With a claim to Alpine style, the pavilion was built of boulders and cobblestones, and a bell hung in front of the entrance. Cows were ordered from England, Holland, and Courland, and Maria Feodorovna invited farmers from Switzerland to care for them. She wanted everything to be natural and no worse than that of the other Marie – Antoinette.
And at the same time, in the park of Antoinette's Petit Trianon, given to her by Louis XVI, a farm was being built – a decorative farmstead with a dovecote, a mill, and peasant buildings. For verisimilitude, extras, milkmaids with cows, hunters, shepherds, and cheesemakers were invited. On the bank of a babbling brook (water is piped in), laundresses sit, manure piles are left, and cracks on the walls and pieces of peeling plaster create the effect of natural aging.
At Versailles, it is prim and boring, plagued by curtsies and reverences, but perhaps the most offensive thing is that the young queen feels unloved, that she is a stranger. And she invents her own artificial world, hides in it, and asks to live as a peasant girl. It is for the Trianon, for its monstrous absurdity, that she will have to answer to the people she played at, and ascend the scaffold as a state criminal.
So at the end of the 18th century, the chalet, popular in Europe, had nothing in common with a Swiss house. It was a symbol of simple life, a memory of a never-existent pastoral idyll, conveying rather a certain worldview than being an exact combination of details of the corresponding style. What is this if not the first virtual reality?
If you have never been to the Swiss Alps, for example, in the Bernese Oberland region or in Graubünden, be sure to go there! You will immerse yourself in the smell of freshly cut grass, the monotonous jingling of bells around the necks of happy cows, the noise of waterfalls, and the real idyll of wooden houses scattered across narrow valleys and slopes.
In the Bernese Oberland, for example, Byron composed "Manfred," Tolkien found the landscape for the elven realm in "The Lord of the Rings," and Karamzin, following Rousseau, yearned for a primitive state: "Why were we not born in those times when all people were shepherds and brothers!" And above loom stone giants, the peaks of the Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau, with eternal snow on this Swiss roof of the world. In Graubünden, in the town of Sils-Maria, recently celebrated in a film with the incomparable Juliette Binoche, the great Nietzsche lived. We are in the Alps – and it is precisely here that one should seek real chalets.
Only here can you stumble upon entire villages consisting of chalet houses. These houses are two and three hundred years old, some even older, their walls dark, scorched by the sun. Not pyramids, of course, but a construction tested by both time and the elements. The mountains and this breathtaking landscape, which, by the way, is paid for by the daily hard labor of ordinary peasants and farmers, all this nature – it does not just create a backdrop; it shapes the architecture, creating a stern little chalet house for itself and in harmony with itself.
But the house turns out strong and stable, and you feel as if behind a stone wall. Although the walls were actually made of coniferous trees, only the foundation, basement, and ground floor were stone. Very similar houses, by the way, were built in northern Russia, for example in Kizhi, and this is understandable – harsh nature dictates the same solutions everywhere. In the Alps, wood was taken nearby, always leaving a patch of forest around the house, because it stops avalanches. The logs were dried, sometimes for ten years. The roof was made gabled and at a very steep angle, so that from the side the chalet has almost no windows, but on the facade the windows crowd together like tourists on the terrace of a mountain restaurant. An indispensable attribute is colored shutters and bright geraniums.
The roofs protrude beyond the walls with a long canopy, forming an overhang that protects the firewood stacked against the walls, as well as a balcony-gallery on carved columns, large and spacious, wrapping around the house on two, sometimes three sides. The chalet has a lot of wood carving: window frames, cornices, and balcony walls resemble the lace of collars, cuffs, and frills on Marie Antoinette's dresses.
Building such a house for himself, the solid and hardworking inhabitant of the Bernese Oberland had no idea that his rural life would become props for palace parks. However, Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841), an architect, artist, leader of "romantic historicism" in German architecture, a man who practically rebuilt Berlin, while traveling through the Alps, actively sketched peasant buildings. Upon returning, he built a chalet on Peacock Island (Pfaueninsel) in southwest Berlin.
In 1837, he published a book with illustrations in Germany and England – and the Swiss suddenly had their eyes opened. They suddenly realized the full beauty of the chalet style. And it began. Swiss sawmills massively turned into factories for the production of prefabricated "chalets." In Geneva and Lausanne, Chur and Interlaken, they manufactured a kind of construction kits, exporting them all over the world.
The house is assembled in the workshop, the parts are numbered, then the structure is disassembled, packed in crates, and shipped, usually by sea, to distant shores. Thus, the "Schweizerhaus" arrived at the end of the 19th century at World Exhibitions in Paris, advertising Swiss tourism with its entire appearance and turning into one of the symbols of Switzerland.
A chalet can be anything: a Swiss bank, a train station, or a shopping center! After all, it is just a shell into which any meaning and any story can be placed. In the second half of the 20th century, standard chalets were mass-built in Switzerland, all identical – they became synonymous with a kind of Swiss "dacha." But a chalet can also serve in the army.
While the Soviet Union existed and the Swiss expected an invasion of "red hordes" across Lake Constance every day, so-called "fake chalets" were built throughout the country. You open the barn doors, and there is an artillery piece; you poke at the dark wood of the facade, and underneath is a three-meter concrete wall. How effective such defensive structures are? No one knows, because they never had to be "in action."
In any case, for the fragile and insecure Audrey Hepburn, her rented chalet "Bethania" on Mount Bürgenstock for ten years was both a fortress and a home. And all of Switzerland for her was a refuge; she chose this country only because, she said, "there will never be war."