briolLocation
Owner
Produced by
BARBIAN
VICTORIA AND VALENTIN
KINDOFSPACE
This year the house passed into new hands. Victoria, together with her brother, has taken over Briol, carrying a century of family history into its next chapter. She is young, quietly formidable, and entirely at home here. Twice a week she cooks for up to sixty guests, sending out from the old kitchen the kind of unhurried, honest food that belongs to this place.
There are no roads to Briol. To reach it you leave the car below in the valley and climb, on foot or by mountain taxi, until the trees open and a cluster of houses appears, pressed into the green slopes above Dreikirchen like swallows' nests. At 1,310 metres the air changes, and so does time. Here it seems to have stopped somewhere around 1928, and that is exactly the point.
The main house was first built in 1898 in the style of a Swiss chalet. In 1928 Hubert Lanzinger, a son-in-law of Johanna, reshaped it into the Bauhaus form it holds today, designing everything from the furniture to the colour palette as a single coherent whole. Little has changed since. There are no televisions, no running water in the rooms, no fences, no noise. What there is instead is a spring-fed pool set into the mountain meadow, said to be the first swimming pool in all of South Tyrol, and a silence most people have forgotten exists.
The story begins with Johanna Settari, great-great-grandmother of the family that still runs the house today. For the birth of each of her fifteen children she asked her husband for a new plot of land on the mountain, and on that land she built. She left behind three rules that still govern Briol: the property may only ever pass within the family, no fences may be raised, and everything must be kept "in the spirit of the mountain." Nearly a century later, those rules are still followed to the letter.
