Chalet: How the wooden house became a Swiss house

How do you explain that the chalet stands for Switzerland like no other house? After all, previous generations never often lived in chalets. And even today, the majority of the Swiss live in an urban environment. The chalet, on the other hand, is largely rural. Travel blogs and tourism advertisements like to picture it there to show off a tradition-conscious and natural Switzerland.

This tourist staging is historically consistent. Because the chalet has been closely linked to tourism since its construction. It took an outsider’s perspective to turn the pretty little wooden house into a Swiss cliché.

The chalet is a by-product of industrialization. The 19th century brought more and more people from the countryside to the city and from the fields to the factory. The associated economic and social upheavals resulted in growing mobility. Especially guests from England and Germany loved Switzerland. In the Alps they saw an apparently intact piece of nature. Here they found a backward, but precisely because of that good and healthy life, in contrast to the smoking chimneys of the modern city. For literature, Johanna Spyri has captured this perspective in her Heidi novels in a world bestseller. For architecture, it found its internationally acclaimed form in the chalet.

The rustic barns and barns, as well as the luxuriously crafted houses of local wood, all told of life close to nature in the Alps. This is what they did when they were transplanted to northern European cities. In fact, the success story of the chalet began in the landscaped parks of European high society. They brought back a piece of the mountain from their Swiss travels and set it up in the extensive garden in the form of a “Swiss house”. The chalet became chic as a model version of alpine wooden buildings.

This success did not go unnoticed in Switzerland. Swiss factories soon sent out catalogs from which an international clientele could order the desired semi-finished chalet, complete with personalized decorations, balustrades and facades. Before the emergence of cement and reinforced concrete around 1900 radically changed architecture, alpine craftsmanship found wood an ideal raw material for semi-industrial production. With wooden elements prefabricated in Switzerland, the knitted log cabin found its way to the world. As the architectural historian Marion Sauter explains, the chalet stood for the most innovative building culture for decades.

However, this was not only used abroad. The chalet forms were also adopted in Switzerland. For example, at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900, Switzerland presented itself with an artificial rock around which slightly smaller chalets were grouped. The world was delighted with the photo of the cute little Swiss wooden houses. Especially in tourist regions, they began to imitate them in reality. Last but not least, the Swiss chalets came about because the Swiss capitalized on foreign clichés.

The great appearance in Paris in 1900 also marked a break in the history of the chalet. The innovative era of timber construction came to an end in the 19th century. Modernism built with concrete. As a wooden building, the chalet became a folkloric motif. While it remained a favorite for locals and travelers alike, it gradually faded from architectural focus. Where site protection dictated chalet forms, a conventional concrete house was sometimes built and then encased in purely decorative wooden slats.

It was not until the 1990s that interest in wood as a building material flared up again. In the context of the climate crisis, wood became interesting again as a renewable and sustainable raw material. New technical possibilities also made completely new applications possible. For example, high-rise buildings could now be built with wood. In the 21st century, wood once again became the building material of the future.

And the cabin? The conventional “Swiss house” has also received a new impulse in recent years. For example, the municipality of Vrin in Graubünden received the Wakker Prize in 1998 for a modern development of traditional timber construction. By inviting people to think about resource-conscious construction or urban expansion, the chalet raises important questions today. It remains a homely place of longing across the country. So it fulfills the intention of its European inventors to this day.