In 1913 an English aristocrat bought an alpine meadow and commissioned an Arts and Crafts manor with a concert hall. The war came, the house was finished, and it is assumed she never saw it. It is the only building of its kind in Germany.
Mary Portman
Standing on a meadow under the Zugspitze, near Krün, is a large English country house. It makes no architectural sense at all until you know who ordered it. In 1913 the Honourable Mary Isabel Portman, an English aristocrat of some wealth, signed for the Kranzbachwiese near Garmisch. She was thirty six. Her house's own account of her describes a beautiful, self confident and independent woman, which in 1913 was a set of adjectives that came with consequences.
The house she never saw
She commissioned two English architects, Detmar Blow and Ferdinand Billerey, both working out of the Arts and Crafts movement, and asked them for a manor with a private concert hall and a grass tennis court. The intention was a gathering place: somewhere she and her musical and cultural friends could come and work and play. The house that resulted is, by its owners' account, the only building of its kind in Germany, and the claim is easy to believe. Nothing else in the Alps looks like it because nothing else in the Alps was drawn in London by men thinking about Gloucestershire. Then the First World War broke out and destroyed every one of those plans. The house was completed. Mary Portman never had the chance to return, and it is assumed she never even saw her finished mansion. That is the fact the whole place still turns on. This is a building designed around gathering that was never gathered in by the person who wanted it.
What happened to it instead
From 1931 the Dortmund Evangelical Church leased it as a holiday home. A major fire came at Christmas 1933. In the war it held children under the Kinderlandverschickung evacuation programme, and afterwards it became a recuperation centre for officers of the United States Army. The Church sold it in late 2003. A team of architects from Innsbruck carried out the new concepts and the renovation across 2006 and 2007, with Ilse Crawford of London taking the interiors of the main building, and it reopened in 2007 as a hotel built around wellness. Later work includes a meditation house by Kengo Kuma. So the building has spent a century being used for everything except its purpose, and has now been given something close to it: a house full of people who came for quiet, music and each other's company.
What it is like now, plainly
Adults only, with children admitted from twelve. A spa. Quiet as the actual product rather than as a line in the brochure, which is a distinction you feel at breakfast. The Crawford interiors are the right call for this house and worth a paragraph of their own. Arts and Crafts rooms are easy to ruin in two opposite directions: over restore them into a National Trust pastiche, or gut them and drop a hotel inside. Crawford did neither. The rooms read as an English house that someone lives in, with the hard edges of hotel operation kept out of sight, and the materials doing the talking.
The honest limitation, and the reason to come
This is not a house with a spectacular restaurant attached, and if the reason you travel is dinner, Munich is an easy drive and has both of the tables in this issue. Kranzbach is a house you go to in order to stop. The reason to come is the building. A good spa exists in fifty places in the Alps. An Arts and Crafts manor with a concert hall, on a meadow, built for a woman who never arrived, exists in one.
At a glance
The TGC view
This is the half of the Bavarian pairing for a guest who wants to stop rather than to be programmed, and it is the answer when the requirement is a small house rather than a large operation. We book it for parties without children and we do not send anyone here for the dinner. Schloss Elmau, in the same valley and in this issue, is the opposite answer.
Want us to arrange it?
We hold the relationships, the rooms and the access. Tell us the dates and we handle the rest.
Visit website ↗The newest building in this issue by more than a century, standing on the shore of the Alster inside the city. It is also the house that publishes least about itself, and we have written it accordingly.
Read the review →Behind a gate on Kantstrasse that most people walk past, two buildings that used to try women and then hold them. Grüntuch Ernst finished the conversion in 2022. The rooms were cells, and the house neither hides that nor sells it.
Read the review →A walled garden at the foot of Hidari Daimonji, half an hour north of Kyoto Station, with twenty six rooms in it and sixteen UNESCO sites within reach. The point of the house is that it is not among them.
Read the review →