Miramonti, Val Camonica: the hotel where the builder made the furniture

Interiors · Italy

Reading time: 9 min

Almost every piece of furniture at Miramonti was made by the same man who built the hotel, in a joinery workshop half an hour away. That single fact explains the coherence of the place better than any moodboard, and it is the reason a small alpine hotel in Val Camonica reads as one continuous idea rather than a collection of good choices.

---

Corteno Golgi is a village of around nineteen hundred people at 925 metres in Val Camonica, on the Brescian side of the mountains, five minutes by shuttle from the pistes at Aprica and half an hour from Tirano, where the Bernina Express begins its climb into Switzerland. The village is named for Camillo Golgi, born there in 1843, the first Italian to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Albergo Miramonti has stood on Via Libertà since 1958, built by the grandfather of the family who run it now. He was, by the family’s own account, a man without much money and a good deal of nerve, and the hotel he put up was the first building in the village with hot water in every room. It was aimed squarely at Milanese visitors coming up for mountain air, which is more or less who still comes.

In 2018 the third generation handed the interiors to Boxx Creative, a London studio founded the year before by Nicola Keenan and Nicola Lindsell. What came back is a twenty one key hotel across 962 square metres that has since won at the European Property Awards and taken a BIG SEE Interior Design Award, and which is much more interesting than the word “boutique” suggests. The reason has less to do with the palette than with who actually made the things in it.

One workshop made almost all of it

Here is the fact that organises everything else. The contractor who built the refurbishment and the joiner who made the furniture were the same firm, working out of a workshop in Tirano, about thirty minutes down the valley in the neighbouring province of Sondrio. Boxx did not specify a catalogue and then find someone to install it. They designed with a maker, and the majority of the furnishings were made bespoke by him and his team.

You can see the consequence in the repetition of a single instinct across unrelated elements. The bed frames are carved timber with a gentle curve. The cabinets hung under the wash basins have a rippled face. The doors into the en-suites are reeded glass in pocket frames with curved detailing, and the reeding is a deliberate echo of both the bed frames and the cabinet fronts. The reception counter is built around exposed sections of tree trunk, cut to show the rings and lit specifically to do so. Coffee tables are solid trunk. Bedside tables are round and metal. Desks are solid timber, and storage is open shelving in slim metal frames.

None of those are expensive gestures. They are the moves of somebody who works wood every day and has a repertoire, applied consistently because one hand applied all of it. That is where the coherence of this hotel comes from, and it is the kind of thing you can only buy by buying it from one workshop.

There is a postscript to the joinery that is worth having. The wood chips left over from the workshop were burnt in a furnace to heat houses in the village. That is not a sustainability line invented for a brochure. It is what a small alpine joinery does with its offcuts, and it happens to be the most honest circular-economy detail in the whole project.

Designed from London, in a month, by WhatsApp

The delivery story deserves to be better known than it is.

Boxx had roughly one month to design and three months on site, working through the low season so the hotel could open in time for the December ski season. They ran the project from London without site visits, coordinating with the Italian contractor by WhatsApp, and bridging the language gap with Google Translate and a lot of visual documentation.

That constraint shows up in the finished rooms as a virtue. A studio that cannot stand on site and adjust things in person has to hand real authority to the person who can, which is exactly what produces the single-workshop consistency described above. It also forces the drawings to be about intent rather than micromanagement. The scheme is legible in a way that survives translation, both linguistic and technical: strong wall colour, one timber language, one glass detail, one lighting move per room type.

Nicola Keenan frames the studio’s approach in terms that fit the outcome. Writing about the project, she says: “We always focus on quality and environmental impact in our work. All design details have been fully considered across the hotel. Carpet made from recycled fibres line the corridors and is inlaid within the sustainable, hand-crafted wooden flooring.” The studio’s wider position is that “it is the responsibility of designers to make a difference for society and the planet by choosing carefully what and how we create.”

What was taken out, before anything was put in

The unglamorous half of this project is the plan, and it did most of the work.

Boxx began with a strategic reconfiguration aimed at getting more usable bedrooms out of the same 962 square metres without any of them feeling squeezed. Three things went. Kitchenettes came out of the bedrooms, a hangover from an era when guests self-catered on longer stays. Dining tables went with them. And the small shower cubicles and bidets were replaced with walk-in showers, which is the single biggest gain in perceived room size available in an older hotel and costs less than moving a wall.

What went in was flexibility. There are now five room categories across three storeys: Budget Double, Standard Double, Deluxe Double with a generous balcony, reading area and desk, and two family types. The Family Suite is two connecting bedrooms, each with its own bathroom and its own entrance off the corridor, so a family can occupy both or the hotel can sell them separately on a busy weekend. The Family Suite XL does the same at a larger scale. In a twenty one key hotel with a season that swings hard between ski weeks and quiet shoulder months, that convertibility is not a nicety. It is the commercial argument for the whole refurbishment.

Terracotta outside, forest colours in

The exterior was refinished in a deep terracotta, a colour somewhere on the way to burnt orange, chosen because it shifts with the seasons and the light in the way the surrounding valley does. Against snow it reads warm and faintly Mediterranean, which for a hotel built to bring Milan up the mountain is an entirely appropriate joke.

Inside, the rooms work in green and blue, drawn from the forest and water of the reserve above the village, and punctuated with amber and burgundy accents. Sage green and deep blue appear as wall panelling; throws are ochre and wheat. Windows are shuttered, blinds are sheer linen, bed throws are cotton. Upholstery is Camira, specifically Main Line Plus in the charcoal colourway Girder and the textured Aspect in a dusky sage called Catbells. Architectural hardware, the switches, sockets and ironmongery, is Buster + Punch, which is a London detail quietly threaded through an Italian building.

Boxx describe the interior schemes as drawing on earth, fire, air, water, wood and metal. Six elements, which is neither the classical four nor the Chinese five, and it is best read as a palette of associations rather than a system. What it produces in practice is a set of rooms that each lean towards one register, warm or cool, mineral or timber, without any of them announcing a theme.

Lighting is the one place Boxx bought rather than commissioned. Nicola Lindsell explains why: “Lighting was incredibly important to the client. We chose Italian designed, Flos feature pendants in each of the en-suites and Scandinavian inspired adjustable wall lights to create an appealing focal point in the bedrooms.” Underfloor heating runs beneath the timber floors, individually controlled room by room, which lets the hotel keep the boards clean of radiators and keep guests warm without heating a whole empty floor in October.

The owners were shopping for values, not a look

The client’s own account of the appointment is unusually specific about what they were buying.

“When we decided to redesign the hotel we were conscious of finding a suitable partner that matched our values and design style,” the owners have said. “We loved working with Boxx Creative as they had a great knowledge of suppliers and longterm sustainable options. Throughout the redesign they presented options which reflected our sustainability goals as well as our overall artistic vision for the hotel.”

That is a client describing a procurement decision, not an aesthetic one. They wanted somebody who knew where things came from. The recycled-fibre carpet inlaid into hand-made timber flooring, the locally milled joinery, the contractor chosen partly for energy-saving practice and for hiring within the region, all follow from that first choice rather than from a mood board. Keenan has described the brief as needing to be “a real game changer” if the hotel’s legacy was to continue, which for a third-generation family business is a fairly loaded way to put it.

What the hotel has become since

Miramonti has kept building. There is now an alpine spa with a heated jacuzzi for five and a Finnish sauna, a yoga studio with indoor and outdoor training space, a wood-fired pizzeria, a cigar and whisky lounge lined in timber and furnished with heavy upholstered armchairs and a few industrial pieces, and a small gallery.

The setting has stayed the point. The Riserva Naturale Valli di Sant’Antonio rises behind the village into Val Brandet and Campovecchio, with porcini in the autumn and chamois, marmots and eagles if you are patient. Aprica’s forty kilometres of piste are five minutes away and have over a thousand metres of vertical. St Moritz is forty five minutes by car. It is, in other words, a working mountain village with a very good small hotel in it, rather than a resort.

That is a harder proposition to design for than a destination, and it is what makes the plan work so hard. A hotel in a village has to be a ski hotel, a summer walking hotel, a family hotel and a quiet couples hotel in the same twenty one rooms.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

What makes Miramonti worth writing about is traceable to a single decision made under pressure. With one month to design, three months to build and no possibility of standing on site, Boxx Creative gave the making over to one workshop and designed something that workshop could actually make. Most small hotels are furnished; this one was built.

The result is a hotel where the curve on a bed frame, the ripple on a cabinet and the reeding in a glass door are all the same gesture, because they came from the same bench. In a building put up in 1958 by a man determined to bring hot water to a mountain village, that feels like the right kind of continuity: not a style, but a way of getting things made close to home and getting them right.