Hotel Drei Berge

Some hotels begin with a business plan. Hotel Drei Berge began with Ramdane Touhami falling in love with a mountain village. The French-Moroccan creative force behind Officine Universelle Buly and Parisian studio Art Recherche Industrie discovered Mürren in 2022. Soon afterwards he bought the former Hotel Bellevue, a century-old inn perched high above the Lauterbrunnen Valley, and set about reinventing it. He didn’t want to turn it into another polished luxury chalet. Instead, Touhami restored what could be saved and layered his own wonderfully restless imagination over the top. The result is unmistakably Swiss and unmistakably his: traditional, graphic, eccentric and occasionally surreal. Even the name is rooted in what you see outside. Drei Berge refers to the three great peaks facing the hotel: Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau.

Swiss Vernacular Through a Kaleidoscope

From outside, the pine-green façade, balconies and red-and-white chevron shutters could belong to another era. Step inside and things become considerably less predictable. Touhami and Art Recherche Industrie designed virtually everything: furniture, carpets, typography, menus, signage, tableware, glassware and even the hotel’s signature fragrance. Traditional patterned timber panelling sits alongside brightly coloured rugs, antique objects, vintage Swiss travel posters and mountain flags. Then come the design treasures. Pieces by Charlotte Perriand, Carlo Mollino and Toni Zuccheri aren’t displayed reverentially like museum objects; they’re simply used. A Perriand table might be where bread is cut at breakfast. Elsewhere, handcrafted masks reference the Tschäggättä figures of Lötschental folklore, while a bespoke rug and mural play with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Somehow, none of it feels like a themed hotel. It feels like Touhami has assembled his fantasy version of an Alpine inn and invited everyone inside.

Nineteen Mountains, Nineteen Rooms

There are only 19 rooms, each named after a famous mountain or mountain range. The playful visual language continues, but Touhami hasn’t forgotten that a hotel ultimately needs to work as a hotel. Custom wooden beds designed by Art Recherche Industrie, monogrammed linens, exceptionally soft towels and bespoke bath products bring tactile luxury without conventional five-star gloss. Timber, colour, patterned textiles and vintage details retain the feeling of an old mountain house. And then there are the windows. In a place like Mürren, no interior designer can compete with the landscape—and wisely, Touhami doesn’t try. Some rooms look directly towards the Jungfrau, Eiger and Mönch, turning the mountains into the most spectacular artwork in the building.

Alpine Food Without the Heaviness

Touhami brought his longtime personal chef Ryutaro Kobayashi to the mountains too. At restaurant Jungfrau, he takes the generous spirit of Alpine cooking and makes it lighter and less predictable, bringing Swiss ingredients together with Japanese and Italian influences. It is another example of Drei Berge refusing the expected formula. This isn’t endless fondue and dried meat simply because you’re in Switzerland. The food is designed for people returning hungry from skiing or hiking, but without leaving them defeated by dinner. Naturally, even the menus are part of the design story, hand-printed by Touhami’s mischievously named Société Helvétique d’Impression Typographique—SHIT. A separate little cabin beside the hotel functions as a coffee shop, catching skiers and hikers heading towards the trails and slopes.

The Magic of Mürren

Drei Berge would be compelling almost anywhere. In Mürren, it becomes something else. The tiny village clings to a terrace at 1,638 metres above the Lauterbrunnen Valley and has no conventional road access. You arrive by cable car and mountain railway; once here, cars disappear and the mountains take over. It is a landscape wrapped in Alpine mythology. Tolkien’s travels through the region have long been associated with the landscapes that later informed The Lord of the Rings, while high above Mürren sits Piz Gloria, the revolving mountaintop restaurant made famous as Blofeld’s lair in the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. In winter there is skiing; in summer, hiking, paragliding and impossibly beautiful mountain trails. But Drei Berge understands something more fundamental about being here: sometimes simply looking at the mountains is enough.

A Hotel That Doesn’t Behave Like One

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Drei Berge is that Touhami hasn’t treated hospitality as another opportunity to create a perfectly controlled design object. The furniture gets used. Old pieces coexist with new ones. Swiss folklore meets mid-century design, Japanese cooking, French graphic wit and David Lynch. The building’s imperfections remain visible. Drei Berge has character precisely because it hasn’t been smoothed into submission. In an Alpine hotel world filled with variations on timber, fur, fireplaces and expensive minimalism, that makes this little 1907 inn on a cliff in Mürren feel genuinely radical.