The BadeHarpfe & new alpine architecture at the Tannerhof

The essentials at a glance

• The BadeHarpfe brings together a Finnish sauna, a quiet room, two fitness rooms and the outdoor natural pool in a single timber wing completed in 2025.
• A Harpfe is a traditional alpine frame of vertical posts and horizontal rails used to dry hay and grain – found from Carinthia through East Tyrol to Slovenia.
• The outdoor natural pool measures 25 × 5 m, is naturally filtered and heated from April to October, turned over to ice bathing in winter, with a view between the Wendelstein and the Sonnwendjoch.
• Architect Florian Nagler has worked with the Tannerhof since 2007 on the principle of Einfach Bauen – build as little as possible, as well as possible.
• The new alpine architecture runs from the Hüttentürme (2011) and the historic sauna house (1936) to the BadeHarpfe.

My hideaway in the mountains

A long timber building that settles along the contour line. Vertical posts, horizontal beams, a sheltering roof – and in between, where hay once hung to dry, today water, warmth and a view of the mountains. The BadeHarpfe at the Naturhotel Tannerhof was built in 2025, and it does something this house has always done well: it takes an ancient alpine form and fills it anew.

My hideaway in the mountains is the thought that carries everything at the Tannerhof, and the BadeHarpfe is its newest chapter. If you want to know more about how the house has grown over time, you will find it told in full under the architecture of the house. This piece steps aside to look at the one structure that lends the house its name: the Harpfe.

What a Harpfe is

Before the BadeHarpfe was a bath, the Harpfe was a tool of farming. In the southern Eastern Alps – in Carinthia, in East Tyrol, in western Slovenia – it has stood at the edge of the meadows for centuries: a timber structure of vertical posts and horizontal rails or boards over which the freshly cut hay was hung so that wind and sun could dry it. A roof shelters the open frame from rain and snow, so the harvest can be stored safely and dry.

The Harpfe goes by many names. In some Carinthian valleys it is called Köse, in the Möll valley Hilge, in Slovenia kozolec in its single form and toplar in its double form. The word itself is old: Harpfe appears in the sources as early as the 13th century. Its range once reached from Croatia across western Slovenia and parts of Styria up to the highest Möll valley and into East and South Tyrol. A plain, clever form that does a great deal with little material – and that is exactly why it belongs at the Tannerhof.

For the Harpfe is essentially pure function: no ornament, no gesture, only what is needed to let air flow through wood and hay. That attitude – as little as possible, as well as possible – returns in the house's new alpine architecture.

Florian Nagler and the Einfach Bauen principle

The new alpine architecture at the Tannerhof is the work of architect Florian Nagler, born in Bad Tölz and a professor at the Technical University of Munich. He has worked with the house since 2007; the first major project was completed in 2011. His design principle is called Einfach Bauen – simple building: as little as possible, as well as possible.

Einfach Bauen is, for Nagler, not just a gesture but a researched approach. Since 2012 he has led a research project of the same name at the Technical University of Munich, under which three research houses were built in Bad Aibling – one in timber, one in masonry, one in lightweight concrete. The idea behind it: rather than steering a building with a great deal of technology, the construction itself should provide a stable indoor climate. Robust materials with thermal inertia, well-judged room proportions, correctly placed windows and roof overhangs – and, as a result, less technology that can age and fail. Over two years, the measurements in Bad Aibling showed a heating-energy demand below the calculated expectations.

Nagler has spoken about how much this kind of building depends on working together, with the Tannerhof in mind: Building is a matter of trust. At the Tannerhof it is special: afterwards you say it would never have turned out this way without the clients. The client is Burgi von Mengershausen, during the shared leadership phase with Roger Brandes. It is this combination of research, craft and attitude that the Tannerhof understands as new alpine architecture – new, not modern, because here the new always connects to the old.

The Hüttentürme: building up, not out

Nagler's first major work at the house, in 2011, was the Hüttentürme: four slender timber towers on the slope, each with three double rooms of about 26 square metres. Solid wood, larch shingles, floor-to-ceiling glass doors, classic Bolich lamps – and a private outdoor seat on every floor.

The towers' guiding idea is at once scenic and ecological: they grow upward rather than outward, so that no alpine meadow is sealed over. Three compact units stack one above the other, each with its own look and its own view into the valley. If you want to learn more about building at the house, you will find it on the page about the architecture of the Tannerhof. The towers brought the house early recognition – among them the German Timber Construction Award for building within the existing fabric and a place in the German Architecture Yearbook.

However different towers and Harpfe may look, they share the same logic: wood that carries and shows what it is. No cladding that pretends to be something it is not. This honesty of material is the thread running through every building at the Tannerhof.

The BadeHarpfe of 2025

Where the towers go up, the BadeHarpfe stretches out. As a long timber building it follows the slope's contour line, with an archaic, beautiful beam construction that clearly reveals its model, the hay Harpfe. According to the house's press release of August 2025, it is the world's first BadeHarpfe.

Inside, a two-storey open volume rises in the middle, usable for celebrations, yoga and communal formats. Around it gathers everything a bathing and sauna wing needs:

• A Finnish sauna at 85 °C, with panoramic windows onto the mountain backdrop.
• A quiet room glazed all round and fitted with loungers, where the gaze is simply free to wander.
• Two fitness rooms – one for strength, one for endurance.
• Showers and WCs, plain and conceived in the same wood as the whole.

Florian Nagler captured the BadeHarpfe's long design process in an image that suits this house well: It was something like reducing a sauce – ever smaller, ever more fitting. Reduction as method, not as sacrifice. What stands at the end is a building that claims nothing and yet can do a great deal.

The outdoor natural pool

The outdoor natural pool belongs to the BadeHarpfe, and it is its open heart. Twenty-five by five metres of stainless steel, naturally filtered, heated from April to October – and in summer, incidentally, partly supplied by the house's own photovoltaics. In winter the basin is used for ice bathing, for everyone who wants to carry the house's sweat-laugh-plunge into the coldest month.

The finest thing about the pool is not its length but its view: it opens out between the Wendelstein and the Sonnwendjoch. You lie in the warm water, the mountains stand all around, and the day grows quieter. Burgi von Mengershausen wished for exactly this at this spot: Simply to sit here, to be here – without consciously noticing what is happening to you.

If you would like to combine the BadeHarpfe and the pool with sauna, baths and treatments, you will find the right treatment offering at the house. How the BadeHarpfe came about and what the client hoped it would become is also told in the magazine under the BadeHarpfe.

The historic sauna house of 1936

So as not to leave the impression that sweating is a recent invention at the Tannerhof: the historic sauna house dates from 1936. It holds a Finnish sauna and a bio sauna – and is at the same time a small cabinet of art.

Set into its walls are original Art Nouveau tiles by Otto Wagner, once from the Vienna Steinhof, along with old tiles from a church and replicas designed by Antonio Gaudí. In the fireplace sits a version of Gustav Klimt's The Kiss. Nothing here is new and nothing is loud, and yet every square metre tells a story. Almost ninety years lie between the sauna house of 1936 and the BadeHarpfe of 2025 – and the same thought, that a good place to sweat is more than a cabin with a stove.

So at the Tannerhof old and new, high and low come together, as they like to say in the house. The Retro Future Love of this place is no pose but built reality: a sauna house from the thirties, Hüttentürme from 2011, a BadeHarpfe from 2025 – and among them the old linden, the mountain stream and the alpine meadows that carry it all.

An architecture that does not seek to impress

What unites the new alpine architecture at the Tannerhof is a restraint that has become rare. The buildings do not want to impress; they want to fit – the landscape, the material, the people who arrive here. Wood that looks like wood. Towers that use up no meadow. A bathing wing that owes its name to the drying of hay.

This attitude has been honoured many times over the years, from the BDA Prize Bavaria for spatial effect and the German Timber Construction Award to the Architektur-Nike for composition; the Blaue Schwalbe eco-label stands for the ecological side of the same thinking. But the awards are not the point. The point is that you can bathe, sweat and sleep here without the built fabric ever getting in your way. Mensch, werde wesentlich – become essential – the house's inner philosophy finds its quiet echo in this architecture.

Experience the architecture

If you want to see the BadeHarpfe, the Hüttentürme and the historic sauna house with your own eyes, you will find at the Naturhotel Tannerhof a new alpine architecture that claims nothing and holds a great deal: wood, mountain views, an outdoor natural pool between the Wendelstein and the Sonnwendjoch and a sauna house from the thirties. More on how the house has grown is at the architecture of the house; for a stay, the short path runs via the enquiry page.