Pedevilla Architects’ Bühelwirt Hotel reaches for new heights

In South Tyrol, architecture begins not with form but with restraint. This is the founding principle of Pedevilla Architects, the Bruneck-based studio led by brothers Armin and Alexander Pedevilla, whose work feels less like intervention and more like listening. Their buildings do not announce themselves. They arrive slowly: grounded, elemental, tuned to the topography and temperament of the Alps.

Founded in 2005, the practice operates from a 15th-century manor house in the centre of Bruneck. A team of ten architects work here, diverse in background but united in ethos. The studio produces architecture that is rigorous, regional and radically quiet. Their projects resist spectacle; instead, they lean into a poetics of place, material and memory. There is no interest in novelty here. What matters is permanence, clarity and emotional precision.

“We build with local materials, with local craftsmen and with the character of the people who live here,” the brothers say. “It’s not an intellectual pursuit, but an emotional one: we want our projects to be able to age with dignity.”

This is not branding. It is a belief.

Pedevilla ambitiously break the mould of traditional Alpine vernaculars, yet keep their work deeply rooted in the locale. They challenge the usual safe bet; in doing so, their buildings become statement pieces. Not through volume or extravagance, but through architectural clarity. Their work is iconic without ever being brash.

Across their portfolio – from the brooding expansion of the Bühelwirt Hotel in Ahrntal to the civic subtlety of ATTO Suites in Innichen – certain ideas repeat. There is obsessive care for proportion and light; a belief that materials are not inert but alive; and an understanding that architecture must converse with its setting: the landscape, the weather, the culture embedded in the soil.

Pedevilla’s work is inseparable from its Alpine context. In a region shaped by heavy snowfall, harsh light and sharp gradients, buildings must be both shelter and lens. Their volumes are solid, often monolithic; yet always refined by detail. A window that leans slightly forward. A shadow gap that recasts an entire façade. A droplet-shaped motif repeated across timber, terrazzo and metalwork.

Their material choices are hyper-local: unfinished spruce, fragrant pine, tinted insulating concrete whose colour and grain reference the regional Bachstein. The palette is not decorative but structural, climatic and cultural. In an age of over-articulation, their buildings speak in a low voice.

Bühelwirt

Bühelwirt, clad in charred timber, rises like a silhouette from the hillside. Inside, light floods rooms finished with pale wood and South Tyrolean textiles. The layout responds to solar exposure; the floor plan opens up in fractured geometries that draw light from multiple directions. A connecting bridge was designed with such restraint that no existing view was compromised.

ATTO Suites

At ATTO Suites in Innichen, the gesture is subtler still. A gabled form holds seven holiday apartments and a farm-to-table restaurant. The building completes the historic street frontage without asserting dominance. It mediates between private comfort and public continuity. The construction respects scale, rhythm and sightlines, while drawing out the Alpine drama of the Haunold range from every window.

A culture of continuity

Both brothers trained at TU Graz before establishing separate practices in Austria. In 2005, they returned home to South Tyrol and founded the studio together. That return marked a shift: their work began not just to inhabit the region, but to express it.

This is a studio built on slowness. Many team members have grown within the practice; their long-standing collaboration allows for layered thinking and deeply site-responsive design. The result is coherence: a quiet architectural integrity that runs through every project.

Their modesty has not gone unnoticed. Awards and recognition have followed: the Austrian State Prize for Architecture and Sustainability; Architetto Italiano; a steady stream of publications and international exhibitions. Yet the work remains focused and finely tuned to context. If anything, it has grown quieter, more distilled.

The ethics of enough

At a time when much architecture strains to be noticed, Pedevilla holds the line on restraint. Enough height. Enough light. Enough material. Their buildings do not compete with their surroundings; they complement them. To move through one of their spaces is to feel the precision. First, you notice the silence, then the weight, and, if you are paying attention, the generosity.

These are not buildings that try to be remembered. They are buildings that remember where they are.