Hotel Restaurant Mühltalhof, Unternberg – Austria

A place that makes people and water go slow is home to a jewel of a retreat for culinary hedonists: the Mühltalhof hotel and restaurant. The wish of one of the best chefs in the country (Philip Rachinger) to upgrade and expand the kitchen of the sixth-generation hospitality business prompted the renewed architectural expression of a family success story: AllesWirdGut reinterprets Mühltalhof 6.0 as a collage of individual, finely tuned, and self-consistent spaces and situations that always also appear as a coherent larger whole. So the kitchen was moved into the center of the restaurant, the spa area on the garden floor was expanded with formally reduced facilities and clearly reoriented to open to the garden and the in-house riverside swimming area. The gentle conversion of Mühltalhof is based on the vision of an entire hotel village of different special lodgings. At the same time, the design concept is meandering through traces of the past, uncovering histories and respectfully transposing them into the present time. The backbone of the spatial narrative is a long stone counter of local chlorite gneiss that references the visual impression of forest, grass, and water. Inspired by the idea of a market street, this twenty-meter-long piece of furniture guides hotel and restaurant customers through the day—from reception desk to breakfast buffet, from the drinks counter and kitchen pass to the ‘chef’s tables’ in the redesigned fireplace room. Nuanced wood paneling frames the setting and adds to the overall impression of well-organized hospitality. The individual qualities of the existing restaurant rooms were reaccentuated to create a differentiated tripartite spatial setting: While the taproom still breathes the atmosphere of the historical inn, the fully glazed veranda continues to offer seating in a special place close by the water. The fireplace room, which is the Mühltalhof’s fine-dining area, looks both inward and outward: to the Große Mühl river flowing by and to the futuristic new kitchen workshop—including the open fire stove, glowing charcoal grill, and bread-baking oven. Accordingly, the room was given a dimmed atmosphere with pitch-black wall paneling and a coffered ceiling. The new Mühltalhof is all fired up from inside, you could say, in light of yesterday shining into tomorrow, today.