The Philosophy of the Tannerhof

The Tannerhof is complicated and confounding, moving between hotel, health, organic gourmet cuisine, art and nature. It doesn't always make things easy for its guests — nor for itself; and certainly not for tourism experts, hotel classifiers, review portals or booking portals.

Because what the Tannerhof has become, through its evolution, is peculiar, and its story has a poetry of its own. What it is today is ambiguous, artful, devoted. Holiday, health, therapeutic fasting, five-course menu, rooms of 9 (!) to 36 sqm, the Hüttentürme, the Lufthütten, high culture, pop, theatre, politics and music. None of it really fits together. And yet — it is wonderful to love things that don't belong together.

To oscillate between genres and registers, between old and new, high and low. What's truly unrealistic is the artificial focus on a single dimension — "design," for example. The kind of thing the design-hotel scene likes to call aesthetics or style but actually means death — something the Tannerhof avoids like an evening on the set of Musikantenstadl.

Ordinariness, ease, young alongside old, loud alongside quiet, schnapps alongside herbal tea. We take that seriously. We don't necessarily take ourselves seriously, though — not always. It chafes a little, and friction creates warmth, and that warmth is precisely what you find at the Tannerhof.

Here, the architecture and the philosophy of the Tannerhof are at last uncompromising: chacun à sa façon.

What sounds like a cliché can also be a philosophical statement — if you choose to read it that way.

In some ways the Tannerhof provokes — it seems plain, almost naive, affectionate, idiosyncratic, deliberately analogue. It looks unhurriedly old-fashioned and yet radiates SCIENCE FICTION — less is more.

Burgi von Mengershausen says: "There are definitely people who don't think much of the Tannerhof. And that's how it should be. Of course. We don't like everything either. But what it means is this: there's a place here that is so open and free that a great deal can fit inside it. There are places and hotels that are very clear and very precise and bored to death. And then there is the Tannerhof.

Our guests — we feel — are mostly delighted, and most of them know, feel and understand what it's about, and take from it what they need. And that makes us happy too."