Stieg’nhaus: the Austrian hotel built outwards from a staircase somebody decided to keep

Design travel

Reading time: 9 min

A software couple from Bavaria bought a closed village restaurant next to a church in Salzburgerland and gutted it in ten months. The architect they hired had founded her practice the year before. What they kept was one staircase, and the whole building is drawn out of its curve.

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Stieg’nhaus opened on 12 June 2025 in Mühlbach am Hochkönig, a village of about 1,400 people at 854 metres in the Pongau, an hour from Salzburg. It has six suites, a rooftop sauna and whirlpool, and a restaurant with seven tables.

Within five months of opening, that restaurant went from no rating at all to three toques and 15 points out of 20 in the Gault&Millau Österreich 2026, one of only two restaurants in that edition to go straight from nothing to three, and took the guide’s New Opening of the Year. The building took a BIG SEE Architecture Award in 2026.

None of that is why it is worth writing about. It is worth writing about because of a decision made before any of it: the owners walked into a closed restaurant, looked at the staircase, and built everything else around it.

Everyone involved was new to this

There are three parties to name here, and the interesting thing about all three is how recently they arrived.

The architect and interior architect is Carolyn Sarah Herzog of Hkollektive, based at Saalfelden am Steinernen Meer, forty minutes down the valley. She trained at the HTL Saalfelden in building construction, then read engineering at RWTH Aachen, then spent several years in Tyrolean architecture offices. She founded Hkollektive in 2023. Stieg’nhaus is, on the practice’s own published record, its first building of any scale, and it won a regional architecture award in its first full year.

The owners are Maria and Tom Heidenreich, both in their early thirties, both from Bavaria, with roughly fifteen years between them at a German software company before they changed careers. They married in 2021, decided to move to Austria, spent 2022 looking in Carinthia, had two projects fail in 2023, and then found this one. Design Hotels credits the interior design jointly to Herzog with the Heidenreichs, which for a six-suite owner-operated house is an accurate way to put it.

Branding is by WUGER, Brands in Motion of Salzburg, whose logo for the hotel is a single circle: the Stiege, drawn as an ensō. The architectural photography is by Karin Pasterer.

It was the sexton’s house

The building is the Mesnerhaus, the sexton’s house of the parish church of St Sebastian, which it faces across the village centre. The church was begun in 1520 and not finished until 1637, held up by the Peasants’ War and by a shortage of money.

By the twenty-first century the Mesnerhaus was running as a restaurant with apartments, and it closed in April 2024. The Heidenreichs bought it that August and opened the following June, which is a ten-month programme covering a complete gut and rebuild of a 775 square metre building on a 368 square metre site.

The article as it stands calls this a village restaurant. That is true of the last use and it undersells the building. A sexton’s house standing opposite a sixteenth-century church is a specific thing with a specific relationship to the settlement, and it is the reason the hotel sits where the village looks.

One staircase, and everything drawn from it

Almost nothing of the old building survives. It was taken back to its basic substance and rebuilt. What was kept is the staircase: its softly curved plastered walls and its old metal handrail, which the owners describe as brass and the hotel’s own copy carefully calls “old metal”.

Tom Heidenreich on first seeing it: “The moment we saw the staircase, we knew.” The hotel is named for it. Stiege is the Austrian word for a staircase, and Stiegenhaus is the ordinary word for a stairwell, so the name is both a description and a piece of domestic vocabulary.

The design consequence is the part that makes this a building rather than a decorating job. The curve of that stair became a circular formal language running through the whole house: curved walls, rounded niches, freestanding bathtubs, the saunas, the sculptural elements. Carolyn Herzog structured the interior around four archetypal objects standing for four elements, the bathtub, the staircase, the table and the fireplace, for water, air, earth and fire.

Retaining a single element and generating a geometry from it is a much harder discipline than retaining several and working around them. It commits the architect to one radius and asks the rest of the building to justify it.

Lime plaster, local stone, and a surface that behaves like skin

The material palette is short and it is the argument.

Walls are finished in Kalkputz, traditional lime plaster, worked to a coarse texture. Herzog’s own description of it is the best line anyone involved has given: “It reacts incredibly sensitively to light, almost like a skin.” Lime is not a coating in the way paint is. It carbonates slowly, stays open to vapour, and takes raking light differently at every hour, which in a building with deep window reveals and shuttered openings is doing most of the work.

Around it: locally sourced timber and natural stone, solid oak flooring and oak panelling, linen and wool for the textiles, reclaimed timber, hand-forged metal, and washbasins carved from solid blocks of stone. Two sentences from Herzog set the rule: “Nature shows that every element has a purpose, nothing is decorative, everything necessary.” And, more bluntly, “No staging, no decor, only material.”

The brass is the one deliberate flourish, and it is a quotation. The Gessi fittings through the bathrooms and kitchen were chosen to answer the vintage brass railing on the retained staircase, so the newest metal in the building is keyed to the oldest.

There is a coincidence here that nobody involved has claimed, and it is worth noting as an observation rather than a fact. Mühlbach is a copper village. Copper was mined at the Hochkönig for five thousand years; the modern industry began in 1827 when a shiny piece of ore found near the Hochkeilhaus was mistaken for gold, and the Mitterberg mines ran until they closed for good in 1977. A hotel in that village finished in brass is either a good instinct or a happy accident, and neither the architect nor the owners have said which.

Elsewhere the references are further from home. Mediterranean-inspired shutters throw light and shadow across the plaster, and the owners describe their brief as Istria and Mallorca crossed with the Alps. Herzog worked from wabi-sabi, the beauty of imperfection and transience, toward what she calls authentic and simple elegance.

Six suites, twelve guests

The house takes a maximum of twelve people. The suites are named rather than numbered, in five bookable categories.

Cubo is 35 square metres and aura 40. Circular, at 70 square metres, has a sauna built into the central oval element that gives it its name. Pergola, the largest at 80 square metres, has its own sauna, terrace and outdoor whirlpool facing the Hochkönig. The family suite is 75 square metres, made by connecting two cubo units, and takes four.

Every suite has a freestanding bath. The rooftop holds a sauna, an outdoor whirlpool that can be filled hot or cold, a cold plunge, a treatment room using Omorovicza, a gym and a yoga studio. In-room refrigerated cabinets hold woods_ Copenhagen skincare.

The specified pieces are few and chosen: Sebastian Herkner’s “Gentle” chairs for Linteloo, Corston light fittings, Douxe bed linen, and handmade ceramics by Sarah Lehmann of Soulwerk-Keramik in Tyrol. The rest of the furniture and the stone basins were made to order. The joiner is referred to in the coverage and never named, which is a pity, because on a house this size the cabinetmaker is effectively a co-author.

Five elements, seven tables and a steel ring

The restaurant carries no separate name. The menu is built on five elements, given in the hotel’s own English as pasture, water, earth, fire and nectar, framed by the Austrian trade press as five terroirs. The culinary concept was developed by Markus Lorbeck through his consultancy ARC TO EAT.

The kitchen opened under Benjamin Jochum, previously at Schloss Mittersill, hired through a competitive cook-off the owners ran in January 2024. The chef now named in the Austrian press is Pablo Medrano, whose split is roughly forty per cent Austrian foundation and the rest international, with Austrian caviar rather than imported and a Wiener Schnitzel on the same menu as the contemporary work. Front of house is Alexander Adlgasser, formerly of Jean-Georges in New York and Palais Coburg, with Martin Bauernfeind from Obauer and SENNS.Restaurant.

The fire is not, as it is often described, in the middle of the dining room. It is an Original Feuerring on the terrace, the solid steel cooking ring designed by the Swiss sculptor Andreas Reichlin, which is left to develop its own patina. The distinction matters, because a fire you eat around outdoors is a different proposition from a hearth in a dining room, and the Feuerring is a designed object with an author.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The temptation with a hotel this small and this photogenic is to write it as atmosphere. Quiet luxury, slow living, natural materials, and so on. All of it is accurate and none of it explains anything.

The explanation is a single retained element and the discipline to let it govern. A curved stair in a gutted sexton’s house set a radius, and that radius went into the walls, the niches, the baths and the saunas until the building read as one thing. The material list stayed short enough that the lime plaster could do the atmospheric work on its own, changing hour by hour under raking light, which is what Herzog meant by calling it a skin.

Small hotels are usually made by people who have done it before. This one is the opposite at every level: first hotel for the owners, first building of scale for the practice, first Gault&Millau assessment for the kitchen. It is also a reminder of where good work is now appearing. The project is absent from Austria’s principal architecture database and has had no coverage from any international design title. It is a two-year-old practice from a valley town, working for two former software employees, in a village that lost its industry in 1977. The award juries found it before the magazines did.

Ten months, 775 square metres, six suites, one staircase. There is more architecture in that than in a great many buildings ten times the size.