The first image that greets you in the wood-lined entranceway of the hotel Chesa Marchetta—just after you stamp the thickly packed snow from your boots—is a sun-drenched portrait of the American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Captured by the photographer Lee Jaffe in 1983, Basquiat wears a wide-brimmed hat against a blue summer sky, a copse of softly out-of-focus trees visible in the background. These two worlds may seem like strange bedfellows—what does a luxury hotel in Switzerland’s Engadine valley have to do with the king of the 1980s downtown New York art scene? As it happens, quite a lot.
Basquiat spent time in these mountains in the early 1980s, in a region that has long drawn artists responding to its particular light and sense of isolation, from Giovanni Segantini and Albert Steiner to Gerhard Richter. It’s a fact that Iwan Wirth and Manuela Wirth, the Swiss-born founders of the international gallery Hauser & Wirth, have consciously leaned into with Chesa Marchetta, the latest addition to their Artfarm hospitality portfolio.
Opened earlier this year, Chesa Marchetta occupies the 16th-century shell of a former restaurant and guest house run by the Godly family—the former comprising a handful of rustic wooden tables set in the family living room. Over its 70-year lifespan, it drew Engadine locals alongside St Moritz’s international glitterati, including Gianni Agnelli, members of the Rothschild family, and even Basquiat himself. When the last surviving member decided to hang up her apron—already a nonagenarian—a few years ago, the Wirths snapped up the property. Yet the acquisition was not simply about extending their hospitality portfolio: the restaurant was the site of the couple’s first date in the 1990s.
After a lengthy renovation, Chesa Marchetta emerged as a 13-room boutique hotel that unites vernacular Engadine architecture with Hauser & Wirth’s blue-chip art collectsion. The property is located in the centre of the town of Sils Maria, a quaint Alpine village that sits between two lakes which, in winter, are laced with cross-country skiers ploughing through fresh snow. The vast expanses of ice on either side create a palpable feeling of rural isolation—a far cry from the bustling, condo-packed St Moritz that continues to expand just up the road.
Guests enter the building via a grand, split-level bar with a thick stone perimeter—formerly a stable and storehouse when the property operated as a farm—furnished with horsehair sofas, traditional wooden furniture, and a bathtub-sized spider by the artist Louise Bourgeois, scaling the double-height wall.
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The interiors were conceived by the Paris-based designer Luis Laplace, who is responsible for several Artfarm properties, including tartan-drenched The Fife Arms in Scotland. Laplace largely stayed true to the Engadine vernacular, incorporating hand-drawn murals inspired by the traditional sgraffito technique found on the façades of local houses—hand-etched frescoes scratched into plaster to reveal contrasting layers of paint beneath. He invited British-German artist Corin Sands to create a series of these murals in each guest room, ranging from bucolic landscape scenes to local folklore. The rooms themselves retain many original features, including arven wood-panelled walls—which emit a distinctly pleasant pine scent that floods each corner of the hotel—and low-slung ceilings, or otherwise recreate a farmhouse ambience through hand-hewn antique furniture sourced from the surrounding area.
The restaurant, located on the hotel’s lowest level, with low ceilings, stone walls, and views onto the surrounding forest, is overseen by the Italian chef Davide Degiovanni, who built out his CV in London at the Four Seasons in Mayfair and as head chef at Gordon Ramsay’s Union Street Café. The menu marries the robust Swiss Alpine pantry with the techniques and flavours he absorbed growing up in Piedmont in northern Italy. His signatures include pillowy gnocchi made with local potatoes that swim in a silken pool of cream and black truffle, as well as crispy croquettes with trout sourced from surrounding glacier-fed streams, sharpened with a kick of spicy horseradish. Degiovanni’s insistence on local ingredients has forged a network of suppliers in the nearby Val Fex, a strictly protected valley reached by a winding forest road above the hotel. Though building there was outlawed decades ago, a handful of family-run farms continue to operate, including the organic dairy farm Crasta, set on an idyllic Alpine meadow, whose fussed-over cattle provide Chesa Marchetta with milk, fresh cheese, and beef.
But the Wirths’ cultural influence extends beyond the hotel. Chesa Marchetta is, in fact, the third property they have developed in the Engadine Valley. Their local portfolio also includes Hotel Castell in neighbouring Zuoz, as well as the Hauser & Wirth outpost in St. Moritz. Timed with the opening of Chesa Marchetta, Hauser & Wirth staged an exhibition dedicated to the artistic legacy of the region—a retrospective of Alberto Giacometti’s lesser-known early works titled Faces and Landscapes of Home. The Swiss artist, best known for his elongated bronze figures, was born just down the valley and lived here for much of his life. The exhibition includes portraits of family members, a bust depicting the head of his brother Diego, and photographs by his confidant Ernst Scheidegger, taken in his cabin studio in Stampa. Also included is a rare painting of Lake Sils—a view still encountered today on a short walk from Chesa Marchetta, which, more than a century later, retains the subdued palette and hushed sense of remoteness that define this rarefied Alpine landscape.