Hôtel Borsari: The Classics Graduate Who Gave Martigny Its Roman Baths Back

ARCHITECTURE · MARTIGNY

Reading time: 8 min

John Cretton did not train as an architect or a hotelier. He read Latin, Greek and Ancient History, then spent twelve years turning a derelict winery in Martigny, the Roman crossroads town once called Forum Claudii Vallensium, into a forty-two-room hotel with its own underground thermal baths. The connection is not decorative. Martigny had genuine Roman baths two thousand years ago, and Hôtel Borsari, without a plaque anywhere explaining it, gives them back.

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Introduction

Hôtel Borsari opened in April 2025 in Martigny, a Valais town roughly 33 kilometres south of Montreux at the foot of the Swiss Alps. It occupies a former agro-industrial site, the disused Les Caves Orsat winery, now anchoring LôDzè, a new quarter built around a cobbled central courtyard. The hotel has 42 rooms of 20 to 35 square metres and 8 suites of 36 to 44 square metres, designed by John Cretton, the property’s first-time hotelier owner, working with Shaun Evans under the name Drip and Drip. It is a member of Design Hotels, the collection now part of Marriott’s Bonvoy portfolio, which means a 300-strong roster of independently owned properties, this one included, can be booked and earned against through a mainstream loyalty programme despite each hotel keeping its own identity.

Most coverage of Hôtel Borsari settles for a list of what is genuinely a striking material palette: raw concrete, terrazzo, Dieter Rams objects, a colour scheme in wine-dark reds and forest greens. What that list leaves out is why a first-time hotelier with no design or hospitality training arrived at a building this specific and this considered. The answer is in what Cretton actually studied, and in what Martigny actually was two thousand years before he found the site.

A classicist’s crossroads

Cretton has described Martigny as “the lost place in the centre of everything,” a phrase that sounds like marketing shorthand until the geography and the history behind it are taken seriously. Martigny sits at the point where the Rhône, having flowed south-west out of the Alps, turns sharply north towards Lake Geneva, and that turn made it the gateway to the Great St Bernard Pass, the Alpine crossing merchants had previously paid heavily and travelled at real risk to use. The Romans recognised the position immediately. Julius Caesar’s officer Servius Galba occupied the existing settlement of Octodurus in 57 BC with the Twelfth Legion to secure the pass, and between AD 41 and 47, under the emperor Claudius, Rome established a new administrative capital there for the province of Vallis Poenina, Forum Claudii Vallensium. An amphitheatre, temples and thermal baths followed, and fragments of all three survive in the town today.

That history is where Cretton’s own background stops being a biographical footnote and starts being the article’s actual subject. He read Latin, Greek and Ancient History before ever working in hospitality, which means the Roman crossroads town he chose to rebuild in is not an aesthetic reference he picked up secondhand. It is a period he studied directly, in the original languages, before he owned a single brick of the building that now sits on top of it. Twelve years passed between Cretton finding the disused Orsat winery site and the hotel opening, and the design decisions made across that time read differently once the classics background is on the table: a hotel built from Roman brick-making technique, on a Roman crossroads, that revives thermal bathing at exactly the town that once had it, is not a stylistic flourish. It is the closest thing to a thesis a hotel can have.

The winery underneath

Before it was Hôtel Borsari, the site was Les Caves Orsat, an agro-industrial winery whose nineteenth-century concrete storage tanks were known locally as borsaris, the word the hotel now carries as its name. Cretton and Evans kept that vocabulary literal rather than decorative: guest room categories are measured in hectolitres, the unit the tanks were once filled to, and the rooms themselves are built above ground in raw and stained concrete that deliberately recalls the tanks’ original material. “We’ve taken the idea of the wine tanks and brought them above ground,” Cretton has said of the approach, a line that also explains why the rooms read as a considered material argument rather than a boutique-hotel mood board.

The two buildings that make up the hotel face a shared cobbled courtyard and are finished in handmade brick and lime render, using construction methods the design team has described as traditional Roman brick-making technique, a detail easy to miss in a photograph but consistent with everything else the project is doing. Inside, larch-wood windows, oak parquet floors and coir matting sit against that concrete shell, and the four guest floors are colour-coded to a specific logic rather than a generic palette: deep forest green for foliage, crushed-grape red for the wine the site once stored, basalt black for stone and mineral, and alpine-lake blue for the spring water drawn from the Mont Blanc massif that the hotel’s plumbing runs on. Bathrooms carry black and cream terrazzo tiling and are divided from the sleeping area by wool flannel curtains rather than solid partitions, an open-plan arrangement more common in the region’s older mountain houses than in a conventional hotel room.

Bringing Hôtel Borsari’s baths back underground

The hotel’s most direct link to Martigny’s Roman history sits beneath it. Les Bains Publics, the hotel’s 2,000 square metre thermal bathing complex, occupies the winery’s original underground borsaris, now rebuilt in red concrete and capped at thirty visitors at any one time. No phones and no Wi-Fi are permitted inside, a restriction Cretton has framed as consistent with the hotel’s wider position rather than a wellness gimmick applied on top of it. It is worth stating plainly what this actually is: a public bathing facility, built underground, in a town whose Roman occupants built and used their own thermal baths in roughly the same location two millennia earlier. Nothing in the hotel explains this connection to a guest directly. There is no signage drawing the line from the borsaris to Forum Claudii Vallensium’s baths. The continuity is simply there, for anyone who knows to look for it, which is precisely the kind of detail a classics graduate would build in without needing to point at it.

Analogue, deliberately

Cretton’s stated design philosophy, “analogue, not digital, everything you need and nothing more,” runs through every room. There are no screens. Door locks use traditional physical keys rather than card access. Light switches are Bakelite, made by the Swiss manufacturer Feller, and taps and fittings come from Swiss maker NDW. Furnishing leans on genuine vintage European pieces alongside a specific, repeated set of Dieter Rams objects: Vitsoe shelving, Rams’s 620 seating, and 1962 Braun Audio units placed in a selection of rooms, all designed decades before minimalism became a hospitality shorthand rather than a Rams-specific discipline. Lighting comes from Artemide’s Tolomeo lamps and fixtures by Davide Groppi, and each room carries curated music rather than a streaming interface, ranging from late-1950s jazz through Serge Gainsbourg and Leonard Cohen to 1970s and 1980s electronic recordings.

On the hotel’s use of colour against a hospitality industry that mostly avoids it, Cretton has been direct: “People are very scared of colour… they still seem too often to drift towards a neutral palette.” He has also drawn the clearest line under the whole project’s intent: “We hark back to an era that doesn’t exist, but we’re far from pastiche.” That distinction, between referencing a period honestly and simply copying its surface, is the same distinction that separates Hôtel Borsari’s Roman brickwork and underground baths from a themed hotel. One borrows a look. The other rebuilds a function the town genuinely used to have.

Three rooms, one 180-kilometre logic

Food and drink at Hôtel Borsari are split across three distinct spaces rather than folded into a single restaurant. Le Cercle, the main dining room, is led by chef Matteo Salas, who joins Martigny from Āperi in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, a restaurant profiled by CNN for its tasting-menu technique and where Salas later judged the Mexican edition of Top Chef. La Saucithèque operates as a wine bar built around regional Valais wine and charcuterie, and Alphonse serves coffee through a Mavam machine alongside fresh juice and lighter food. The kitchen’s stated reference points are Lyon, Milan and Zürich, three cities each roughly 180 kilometres from Martigny in different directions, a detail that turns out to restate the hotel’s core argument in culinary terms: Martigny is not a remote Alpine outpost but a genuine crossroads, equidistant from three of the continent’s food cultures in exactly the way it was once equidistant from Rome’s northern trade routes.

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Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

It would be easy to read Hôtel Borsari as another confidently maximalist European boutique hotel arriving at a moment when neutral, screen-lit interiors have become the industry default elsewhere. That reading captures the surface without the reason for it. Martigny was Forum Claudii Vallensium, a Roman provincial capital built at a genuine crossroads, with its own amphitheatre and its own thermal baths, and the man who bought a derelict winery there twelve years ago had studied that history in the original Latin and Greek before he ever owned the site.

Every material decision at Hôtel Borsari reads differently once that is understood. The brick facades made with Roman construction technique, the underground baths built where the winery’s own tanks once stood, capped at thirty guests and stripped of phones, and a restaurant menu built around three cities each precisely as far from Martigny as Rome’s trade routes once ran through it, are not separate design choices. They are a single argument, made by someone trained to notice that Martigny had already been the centre of everything once, and had simply been allowed to forget it.