Some places seem designed to attract attention; others become remarkable precisely because they remain apart from it. Vals belongs to the latter.

Deep in the Swiss canton of Graubünden, the mountain village sits within a landscape that feels elemental rather than manicured: steep Alpine slopes, stone, water and an extraordinary sense of stillness. With only around a thousand inhabitants, Vals is hardly the obvious setting for one of Switzerland's most intriguing concentrations of contemporary architecture.

Yet that apparent contradiction is part of its fascination. Despite its secluded atmosphere, Vals remains accessible from Zurich or Milan, with rail connections towards Chur followed by the final journey into the mountains. At its centre is 7132 Hotel, named simply after the village postcode.

Calling it a luxury hotel does not quite explain it. 7132 is part hotel, part architectural experiment, part thermal retreat — a place where some of the most important architects of the contemporary era have been invited to interpret the experience of staying in this remote Alpine valley. And beneath it all is water.

Where Everything Begins

Long before architecture put Vals on the international map, people came here for its thermal springs. The healing qualities of the local waters were recorded as early as the 17th century, and visitors have been drawn for more than a century to the highly mineralised water emerging from the St. Peter spring at a natural temperature of around 30°C. Then came Peter Zumthor.

Commissioned to create new thermal baths for the village, the Swiss architect conceived a building that would eventually become one of the defining works of contemporary spa architecture. Opened in 1996, the 7132 Therme was constructed from some 60,000 slabs of locally quarried Vals quartzite. Its design feels almost geological: heavy walls, narrow passages, pools of different temperatures and carefully controlled openings through which light enters the stone. Rather than placing a spa upon the landscape, Zumthor appears to have carved one from it.

The baths move between six pools, from the 14°C Ice Pool to the 42°C Fire Pool, while the outdoor pool opens the experience back onto the mountains. Here, wellness has little to do with the increasingly elaborate vocabulary of modern spas. There is something far more fundamental at work: heat and cold, darkness and light, stone and water, enclosure and open sky.

A Hotel Written by Architects

The architectural conversation continues beyond the baths, extending into the hotel itself. At the adjoining House of Architects, four internationally recognised architects — Peter Zumthor, Tadao Ando, Kengo Kuma and Thom Mayne — were each given the opportunity to create their own interpretation of the hotel room. The result is less a collection of rooms than four different ways of thinking about space.

Tadao Ando draws on the restrained aesthetics of the Japanese tea house, creating interiors intended to direct attention towards the Alpine landscape outside. Kengo Kuma uses Japanese carpentry and oak to create cocoon-like rooms, incorporating local granite around an open floor-level shower. Zumthor's rooms take another direction, using stucco lustro, a Renaissance plastering technique, together with saturated colour and hand-painted Habotai silk curtains. American architect Thom Mayne works with wood, black stone and sculptural forms, including a freestanding shower placed at the centre of the room.

It is an unusual proposition for a hotel. At 7132, each room embodies a particular vision. Four architects, four interpretations, four distinctly different experiences. Here, you choose the design, not the size.

The View Becomes Part of the Room

The 7132 Hotel 5S introduces another, more refined expression of the same philosophy. Its suites open onto unobstructed views of the surrounding Alps, while three 90-square-metre penthouse suites designed by Kengo Kuma occupy the upper floor. Their fully glazed façades deliberately blur the boundary between interior and landscape, allowing the mountains to become almost another architectural material. This relationship with the outside world is important because it shapes the experience throughout the property.

For all the celebrated names associated with 7132, the architecture rarely feels as though it is competing with Vals. At its best, it does the opposite. It edits the landscape — framing a mountain, controlling a shaft of light, bringing local stone indoors or creating a quiet place from which to observe what was already there. That restraint may be one of the property's most convincing expressions of luxury.

From the Valley to the Table

The same dialogue between Vals and the wider world continues in the kitchen. At two-Michelin-starred 7132 Silver, Dutch chef Marcel Koolen leads a young international team whose cooking combines ingredients gathered around Vals — including herbs, mushrooms and berries — with exceptional produce sourced further afield. It would be easy for a restaurant of this calibre to exist as a destination separate from the hotel. Here, however, gastronomy feels like another component of the same idea.

Architecture interprets the landscape through stone, wood, proportion and light. The kitchen interprets it through ingredients. The setting reinforces that relationship: Silver itself occupies a space created by Peter Zumthor. The experience therefore becomes another meeting point between design and sensory pleasure rather than simply dinner at the end of the day.

Across the seasons, that relationship with the landscape changes. In winter, snow blankets the valley and steam rises from the baths, while long evenings invite an even deeper retreat indoors. Spring brings wildflowers and the sound of melting water as hiking trails reopen and the landscape softens. Summer offers clarity and sunlight, with open mountain paths to explore before returning to the calm of the pools. In autumn, shifting light and changing colours bring another sense of stillness and the rhythm of the place slows again. Each season shapes the experience of Vals anew.

The Luxury of Going Somewhere Quiet

Perhaps what makes 7132 most relevant now is not its collection of famous architects, its Michelin stars or even its thermal baths, but its distance from everything else. Luxury travel has spent years adding more: more experiences, more facilities, more programming, more reasons never to be still. Vals suggests another possibility.

Come for the water. Walk through the mountains. Start the day in the thermal baths, as morning light reaches the stone and steam drifts into the cool Alpine air. Eat extraordinarily well. Spend time inside remarkable architecture. Look out of the window.

And allow the place to do the rest. There is nothing revolutionary about retreating into the mountains. People have been doing it for centuries. What makes 7132 compelling is the intelligence with which that ancient instinct has been translated into a contemporary experience.

Peter Zumthor's thermal baths perhaps express it most clearly. Stone surrounds the body. Water slows it. Light enters sparingly. The architecture does not ask to be admired every second; eventually, you inhabit it. That may be 7132's real achievement: not spectacle, but the ability to make quiet feel complete.

In a small Swiss village, some of the world's most celebrated architects have created extraordinary spaces. Yet ultimately, what one remembers may not be architecture at all. It may simply be how completely quiet everything became.